#internet ugly

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I might be “Internet ugly,” but I’m still sexy offline and that’s all that really matters lol.

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While companies themselves adhere to sleekness and simplicity, like Google’s clean white background and solid colors, or Apple’s simple product design, when we turn to amateur content creators and user-generated content platforms we see things start to get sloppy, and ugly on purpose (Feldman). This leads us to wonder: why would people want to create things that are “ugly on purpose”? One might assume that the higher quality would always “win”, but the Internet has proven this isn’t always the case. 

As the world is becoming busier and more connected with each passing year as technology continues to develop, amateur content creators favor flexibility and convenience, the “quick and dirty” over the “slow and polished”. “Instant” is better than “perfect”, and customization is king. Some reasons why quantity is valued over quality in the digital sphere is because of its speed, the absence of gatekeepers, and because ‘threads’ or digital discussions can only be around for a few hours before they expire, participants must churn out their content and upload it before its relevance is over (Eveleth). Consumer technology also has been designed to make things easier, as the technology is specifically “meant to put activities and skills that once required specialized knowledge within the reach of the common man." (Feldman)

"As opposed to media like TV or print, where the amateurish is marginalized and audience attention centers on mainstream blockbusters, the internet is built to give outsized attention to the amateurish, the accidental, and the surprise hit”, says Douglas, who coined the term ‘Internet Ugly’. While most of his article spoke about it in a visual medium such as Rage Comics or Nailed It images, he only barely touched upon the way that amateur writers flooding spaces online has had an effect on textual Internet Ugly.

Internet Slang and memes stemming from Fan fiction

User bases for many of the most popular websites or modern technology comprises of mostly amateurs: "Amateur writers, amateur designers, amateur photographers and film editors.” (Eveleth)

While the typical ways that Internet Ugly expresses itself is through “freehand mouse drawing, digital puppetry, scanned drawings, poor grammar and spelling, human-made glitches, and rough photo manipulation”, Internet Ugly can have roots in amateur writers online as well as the way that language/slang can change on the Internet, favoring poor grammar or spelling because it adds humor. I’d like to share a few examples of how Internet Ugly can affect textual content as well.

While there are also websites to upload original fiction, fan fiction thrives online, and because it is often dominated by amateur or very young writers, it has a stereotype for being poorly written, sometimes extremely so. 

Three major websites host this type of content and dominate the field of written transformative works: Fanfiction.net, Archiveofourown.org (also called AO3), and Wattpad. AO3 alone has 3,466,000 uploaded ‘works’. Amateur writers and their sloppy, terrible styles often turn into part of the Internet language itself. For example, memes have come out of the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes from young teens in a popularized format called “One Direction Imagines”, published on Wattpad. As this format has exploded, it is getting harder to find the line between what was once a genuine “imagine” and just bad writing or what is a parody of that kind of writing.

Another example would be one of the most infamous fan fictions of all time, also known as “the worst fan fiction ever written”, is a Harry Potter inspired work called My Immortal which was recently confirmed to be a parody after over 10 year of speculation as to whether it was a “trollfic”, or not. 

Many of the lines in the story have become memes themselves, such as the style of the opening paragraph being translated to apply to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 

[Above: written with the prompt “Imagine Shakespeare but written in the style of My Immortal”]

Some buzzwords or phrases that become meme-like and spread in online communities are often misspelled, or absurdist, and become just more common vocabulary within Internet Slang. The components of this slang include: 

Intentional misspellings, with roots in “LOLspeak” from gaming chats, such as “I can has Cheezburger”, or a more recent example of replacing “small” with “smol”. 

Phonetic translation as a result of shorthand texting on SMS, or on old cell phones that you would need to hit one number pad several times to get a letter, called t9 word. An example of this would be “u” instead of “you”, “gr8″ as “great”, or “2″ instead of “to” or “too”.  

Acronyms, which come and go. “Lol” (laughing out loud) or “lmao” (laughing my ass off) have stayed strong for a while and are still in use today, but it’s probably been a long time since you’ve seen others that have faded away, such as “rofl” (rolling on floor laughing), or its cringier brother, “roflcopter”. 

Another important factor for the messiness and sloppiness of even the most popular memes has to do with who is on the receiving end for this type of content. 

Most people that see and share these images, memes and jokes are other average people who love memes and Internet cultures, who care much more about how funny the joke is than how good the image actually looks or if the spelling is accurate.

Douglas argues that Internet Ugly isn’t going anywhere. 

He says, “So long as some creators have more ideas than capabilities, there will always be an Internet Ugly.”

Works Cited

Nick Douglas (2014). “It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic” in Journal of Visual Culture 13(3), pp. 314-339.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/internet-ugly-and-the-aesthetic-of-failing-on-purpose/384023/

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/10/the-internet-trends-toward-crap.html

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Okay…

Just because I say that I’m “Internet Ugly” doesn’t mean that you should agree with me lmao. Anyway, I appreciate your candor!