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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''Summer has come and passed
''The innocent can never last
''Wake me up when September ends''
Back in the old days, few people could access [[The Internet]], even if they'd somehow heard of it and wanted to access it in the first place. One of the few groups that ''could'' was college students: universities were among the very first Internet adopters, and college-affiliated people, especially students, were one of the main demographic groups on the Internet through the first half of [[The Nineties]].
The upshot was that every September, there would be a large influx of new users: college students accessing the Internet for the first time. The student body effectively had a collective memory span of approximately four years - just long enough to complete the course, get a university degree and leave, only to be replaced by the next cohort. These newbies were not privy to the manners and folkways of Internet discussion, let alone the technical side of it. Established netizens took it upon themselves to teach the n00bs the netiquette, and within a few months the Internet would go back to being a place for sensible and intelligent discussion.<ref>[[Hilarious in Hindsight|Stop laughing.]] We may not have had BitTorrent or [[Twitter]], but the early Internet had its charms: spam hadn't been invented yet, and [[
Then, in 1993, AOL opened up the then-dominant [[Fora|forum]] of the 'net, [[UseNet]], to ''every'' customer, and Usenet was overrun. The social structure that had worked fine to incorporate a relative handful of newcomers was ineffective in a world where the newcomers vastly outnumbered the old guard. Worse, for every newbie that could be civilized or driven off, more and more took their place immediately. This is the Eternal September, the age the Internet now lives in; most of the old guard are gone, vanished, or formed more minor net societies within the larger Internet as a whole.
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Since the local culture is too overwhelmed to pass on its customs and social structures, what most often happens is that the old society vanishes and chaos reigns for a while until a new society, with its own rules and customs, can form. A comparison may be drawn to the [[The Wild West|Old West]] in general, and ''[[Deadwood]]'' and ''[[Red Dead Redemption]]'' in particular.
See also [[Newbie Boom]] and [[It's Popular, Now It Sucks]]. Contrast [[Fleeting Demographic Rule]].
* ''[[Bastard Operator From Hell]]''
* The [[Jargon File]]
* ''[[The Journal Entries]] of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et al.''
* [[Kibo
* The earliest ''[[Legion of Net
* ''[[Undocumented Features]]''
* ''[[The Wulf Archives]]''
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:The Nineties]]
[[Category:Eternal September]]
[[Category:Net Culture]]
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