Originally Posted by Forkbeard

I believe you are missing the point of the discussion. This is an attempt at description, not justification.

The internet is full of cultures and subcultures. There's a gamer culture on the internet, a sports culture, a warez-trading culture, a slash-fanfic writing culture, a BDSM culture, and a million more. Each of these cultures has their own forums, sites, blogs, morals, beliefs, slang, t-shirts, conventions that they go to -- hell, often you can tell which internet culture somebody is in just by looking at the abbreviations they use in their text messages. The slang is distinctive in many cases, sometimes so much so that it's like a unique dialect or language.

These are cultures in exactly the same sense that sociologists study the 2000 different cultures of headhunters in New Guinea -- people organized by common beliefs, ideas, language, behavior, and tradition. To deny the existence of cultural identity among these groups is just ignorant.

Now, on the internet and in the real world, there's a huge political fight about whether we ought to respect all cultures, or whether it's perfectly fine to say "this culture is civilized and great, whereas that culture is barbaric, uncivilized, and full of losers who deserve what's about to happen to them when they get bulldozed by history." You, BlackCrayon, seem to think that fight is over, and that just by labeling something a culture, it's automatically entitled to respect. (And so you're balking at the stage where we label something as a culture.) I don't agree -- on the internet or in the real world -- and I never made that argument.

But the cultural reality of internet groupings is real. And it won't go away just because you happen to despise one of those cultures, no matter how good your reasons for doing so might be.