The 1990s Internet Environment
To understand early viral culture, it helps to picture the everyday experience of being online in the 1990s. Getting onto the internet usually meant tying up the phone line, listening to the screech of a modem, and waiting for static-filled connections to stabilize. There were no feeds designed to keep you scrolling. Instead, you navigated by typing in URLs, following lists of links on “home pages,” and bookmarking your favorite sites.
Communities formed in places like Usenet newsgroups, IRC channels, and web forums. These spaces were smaller and more topic-specific than many of today’s platforms. Identity was built largely through usernames, signatures, and the kinds of things someone chose to post or link, rather than through algorithmically curated profiles.
How a Meme Traveled in the 90s
In this context, memes did not go viral because a platform boosted them. They traveled because individual people decided to copy, rehost, or forward them. A single joke might start as an image on somebody’s personal site, then get saved and uploaded again on a different server, then attached to an email, and then eventually discovered by a journalist writing about “weird stuff people do on the internet.”
This slower, more labor-intensive spread had a few effects:
- Memes tended to linger longer; there was less pressure for constant novelty.
- Communities developed deep in-jokes that could be hard for outsiders to decode.
- Technical knowledge (how to make a GIF, how to upload to an FTP server) mattered for who could participate.
Personal Homepages as Proto-Social Profiles
Personal homepages on services like GeoCities, Tripod, and Angelfire functioned somewhat like today’s profiles. A typical page might include a short bio, a list of interests, some fan art, and a collection of “cool links.” Early memes fit into this ecosystem as badges of taste. Displaying the Dancing Baby or linking to the “All Your Base” remix signaled that you were plugged in to the latest internet humor.
Scholars who write about digital culture argue that memes are not just jokes but small units of cultural information that spread and mutate as people reuse them. In the 1990s, this happened through copy-paste, right-click-save, and code snippets shared between friends, rather than through built-in share buttons. But the basic logic is similar: ideas survive when people find them funny, meaningful, or useful enough to pass along.