People Who Are Grandmothers

Everyone and their grandmother is on the Internet – literally. Grandmothers are all over the Internet and usually access it through “WebTV.” It’s a wireless keyboard that works through your television and a dial up connection to get her on the “word wide web.” It’s as close to using a typewriter to email as you can get. They log on to send me pithy emails admonishing their grandchildren that they have time to Twitter yet no time to email my grandmother with “the gout.”

via Adrien Field

People Who Work Office Jobs and Use Google Reader and Their RSS Feeds to Keep Up With Alternative News Sources

These people are almost always male. They sit in cubicles or at computer desks and incessantly send article links to everyone who’s online when they are. Sites they read include Gawker, Jezebel, Vulture, Digg Reel, and any other source that covers a topic they have covered by a Google Alert. Sometimes they’re fans of Reddit and 4chan, and will try to introduce me to a meme that I’ve prematurely declared ‘irredeemably passe.’ They can’t get enough of YouTube. And they rarely have personal speaking brands because they are past that age of ‘proving themselves’ (anywhere from the age of 28 to 35). These men are the least lewd of any ‘fans’ I converse with.

via Bebe Zeva

People Who Project Themselves With an Excess of Fervor Into Social Media in an Effort to Feel Included or Relevant

These people follow a minimum of 100 people on Twitter of which only 8-20 percent are people they actually know IRL. The rest of the people they follow are largely actors, minor internet celebrities, musicians and news personalities with ‘verified’ accounts. The majority of their Twitter activities involve:

Replying to things Kanye West says as if they were engaged in a one-on-one conversation with him; offering unsolicited tweets to actors to see how they are doing as if in full expectation of a reply; trying to link news personalities to articles while saying things like ‘would love to hear your commentary on this issue,’ and even sending ‘DMs’ to minor internet celebrities with whom they have had a handful of incidental Twitter exchanges letting them know they will be ‘in town’ and perhaps the minor internet celebrity wants to hang out or can they recommend an entertaining venue or a way to spend their time since they will be wandering around all by themselves.

via Leigh Alexander

People Who Talk a Lot of Shit

A mysterious breed of people, they often go by pseudonyms to remain anonymous (indicating a form of hypocrisy/logical or philosophical flaw of which they’re highly likely to accuse only others that are not them). If they don’t go by pseudonyms, they’re confrontational and aggressive about the shit they talked when you accidentally and awkwardly happen to meet them at a party whose host you’re barely acquainted with. People who talk a lot of shit are extremely widespread, populating some of the most heavily trafficked websites, and tend to coalesce around content regarding hipsters, politics, YouTube videos, (any type of) artistic tradition, anything that hints at ‘fact’ or ‘opinion,’ and typos. Their motivations seem to be fairly consistent: they’re usually trying to ‘put one in one’s place’ (i.e. make sure a certain person knows they aren’t part of the club), provide the argument that trumps all other arguments and ends the discussion (ironically, this almost never happens – instead it only tends generate a string of counterpoints, many related to semantics, definitions, -isms, and word choice), and validate and reinforce their identities/worldviews as ‘right’ to themselves, to commenters, and to every person who might happen upon their argument/internet persona/ pseudonym in the future.

via Brandon Scott Gorrell

People Who Comment on Gadget Blogs

Sometimes these people actually say a word out loud while typing. They will defend a product through character attacks and capital letters. It is common for these people to ignore the cries of their children while Engadget is refreshed fifteen times. They have toilets that get cleaned twice a year. They have wives who are tired of discussions about cellphones at dinner. “Apple products are overrated, other than the iPhone,” these people say. “Maybe Android phones will be better after the next few software updates,” they say, over macaroni and hamburger steak. The wives of these people will commonly dream of horses running free and wild, in the wind.

via Gene Morgan

People Who Are Guys Who Work Retail and Read Rap Blogs

Their jobs have the Internet but it’s only for connecting to R-Pro retail inventory software. The Internet is blocked for any other use. During work they fantasize about checking The Fader. When they get home, they swiftly log on and check several critical underground rap Blogspot pages with default layout design settings. They click curiously on the profile of a very insightful blogger and are delighted to find the hit-count is very low. “Freshmeat,” they think. They probably add the new blog to their blog’s ‘Internet hood buddies’ section. They have girlfriends who will arrive later with laptops. The couples usually sit next to each other on a couch. They listen to Waka Flocka Flame using their Xbox media player. The guys think happily about purchasing various clothing items online that will enhance both their online and ‘street’ personas. They order a veggie pizza. They carefully remove a dragon bong from a nearby shelf and take a massive, class-conscious ripper. They cough jadedly.

via Erik Stinson

People Who Are Girls Who Read Their Horoscopes

Pretty self explanatory. These girls usually have boring office jobs with a semi-important title, for example, “General Manager.” They are good at their job and also good at updating their Facebook status every 20 minutes. They’re not on Twitter because the character restriction makes it too boring. They all got married too young and really love their husbands, usually because their husbands are assholes and these are the kind of girls who like d-bags. They have at least one kid and are only 27 years old and chances are, I went to high school with them. They love frogurt, hate Pinkberry (too sour) or love Pinkberry (it’s sour!) and one of their kids is named “Aden” or “Aryian.”

via Lesley Arfin

People Who Are Adults Who Have Recently Become Aware of the Internet

Somehow these people have lived the majority of their lives without needing the internet. It’s very possible that they know (or are) former, current, or upcoming contestants/subjects of the TLC show “Hoarders.” An adult who has recently become aware of the Internet (AWHRBAOTI) has maybe been raised in a low-income household and had a family history of jobs that naturally aided in their detachment from Western society. Some have been born into religious cults. Many have lived in severe weather climates. The crew of the deep-sea oilrig who later manned the spaceship in “Armageddon” fits this category, before they returned to fame and riches on Earth. Since the AWHRBAOTI sampling pool is so large, it’s hard to definitively generalize their Internet activity, but there is a very high probability that the majority of cryptic, mysterious searches (i.e. “drowning chickens methods,” “tita help me choke instruction video,” “what is Iceland?”) that surface on personal blog Statcounters are from AWHRBAOTI. It has been hypothesized that spam e-mails are not robotically generated promotional devices, but early clues to the development of an AWHRBAOTI language rooted in advanced mimicry of internet runoff. The more skilled and curious members of the AWHRBAOTI community are known to accidentally create Twitter accounts, then become so overwhelmed with the home screen that they go on massive “following sprees” that end in the prompt administrative deletion of their accounts. They are said to be forming a new social network: “FanLinkChat.”

via Megan Boyle

People Who Are Cool Moms

My mom just got an Android phone for her 55th birthday and now spends every waking moment Googling quiche lorraine recipes and liking my status updates on Facebook. She finally feels “hip” and “technologically sound.” For five minutes in a dark restaurant, she turned on her flashlight app to read the menu, until her phone went dead and she couldn’t call my dad to tell him she would be coming home late. It seems to me like “emerging Moms” are a demographically sound part of the internet. They are the ones who forward you emails of dogs dialing 911 and quizzes that bait: “What does your favorite dessert say about you?” My mom, who is a lemon meringue kind of gal, is apparently “very articulate with her hands and a bit of a diva at times.” This I can attest to. My mom doesn’t quite understand the internet – it still takes her 15 minutes to look something up on YouTube – but she likes it. I think she thinks of the internet as a giant issue of Redbook, where instead of porn and Gawker updates, there’s only newsletters about holistic mud mask treatments and signs to tell if your daughter is depressed. You can always tell a mom on Facebook because they’re the ones with those pages that take half an hour to scroll down to, thanks to all the virtual Sex and the City cosmos bought for their birthday from their childhood best friend and glittering .gifs dispelling what Twilight character they are. On Facebook, my mom’s favorite interests are “gardening, drinking martini’s, watching films, reading, cooking and garage sales.” She likes John Irving and Jacksoul, Matador and You’ve Got Mail.

via Chandler Levack