“in her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, the internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch has what I think is a far better way of categorizing internet users: She divides people according to when they truly “got online.””
“The first group, which she calls “Old Internet People” were on the early forums and message boards of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Usenet, Something Awful, or 4chan (back before it carried the alt-right connotations it does now), for instance”
“A few years later, there came a much, much larger group of users that McCulloch calls “Full Internet People,” or those who got online at the dawn of more user-friendly technology like AOL, AIM, MSN Messenger, MySpace, or LiveJournal in the early-to-mid 2000s”
“Which brings us to the third group coined by McCulloch: the “Post Internet People,” or folks who came to the internet after the cultural significance of the social media monoliths we live with now — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and the like — had already been well-established”