Internet Cliques

I’ve been using the Internet for about 4 years now, and in that time I’ve moved in some fine and funky circles. From the newbie Geocities pagebuilder club, to the guilds of know-it-all Virtual Pet addicts. More recently I’ve become a standards compliant obsessed geek; not that it’s a bad thing - it brings along the best bunch of friends I’ve found so far.

Anyway, during this time on the Internet I’ve come to many conclusions and discovered many observations about the ‘groups’ that people cling to. The Internet is like secondary (high) school - there are various cliques of various sizes. Not just the cliques formed by official rules and group names; but the self-forming, accidental groups that bring people together.

Most of these cliques contain people who share a common interest or purpose. When un-cliqued people are discovered, they’re passed around the group and chatted up. If they are deemed worthy, they get added to the ‘Dailies’ list and their weblog gets commented on by everyone. If they’re not good enough, not elite enough, not trendy enough, not geeky enough - they get dropped as quickly as they were picked up.

Here are my observations about the main cliques on the Internet:

Gothic - not the way of life or the common all-black fad, but something roughly similar. The ‘web’ version. Those that belong to this clique produce mass amounts of ‘deep’ poems containing long words they have to look up, and lots of death or angst. They produce dark layouts with PS/PSP brushes all grouped together in a ‘dirty’ look with graffiti-style decorative text and tiny fonts.

Trendy - trendy sites tend to have huge blends of Britney Spears, or their own tacky vectors of the latest piss-pot pop star. They all tend to look the same because the latest web-trend whips around this bunch the fastest. More tiny text and miniscule IFrames makes their content look bigger. Most ‘trendies’ are happy to pose naked on their featured webcam for just $1.

Geeky - the group I proudly belong to. Only the tip of the icing tends to get accepted into this overly-elite, standards-compliant bunch of nerds. Most geeks use Mozilla (or Firefox), and make sure their sites are viewable in all 349 past versions of every browser. Anti-MSIE vibes are often bounced around weblogs and backed up with the same repetitive goop about loving w3c when really all we care about is being one-step better than all of the rest.

Newbie - not all those in the newbie clique are necessarily new to web design, they just act it. They haven’t quite got past the point that the general population don’t want 22 different tutorials on how to Copy ‘n’ Paste Real Qwik. These are the type that count every word on every page just to compare it to the rest of the generic (crap) content-filled untalented attempts at design who have 210 pages of visitor content. Wow!

Animaholics - those obsessed with the variety of Japanese animation and the twoddle that it brings with it. With a side-bar layout featuring some wide-eyed huge-chested animé ‘beauty’ and various reviews of each and every episode of all series known to man. Most ‘animaholics’ own 8 review sites each and if you don’t feature at least one piece of animé, you’re considered trash.

So.. which one do you belong to?

Page last modified: April 6, 2008