I’ve noticed something weird about the internet.

If we don’t like things anymore. We have to know the lore.

A celebrity does something weird and suddenly people are making videos about their whole history. Someone posts a random picture and it becomes a meme. TikTok creator says one weird sentence and three days later there are thousands of people explaining the story behind it.

And if you don’t understand what everyone is talking about someone will inevitably say “You know?” And if you still don’t know what they are talking about someone will say “No”.

“You don’t know the lore?”

But why do we care so much?

Why does the internet need a backstory for everything?

The word lore first comes to mind when thinking fantasy stories. Something like a fictional world where there is complicated history, characters and relationships and events that happened before the story we’re watching.

Now we use that same idea for real people and real situations online.

A celebrity doesn’t just have a career anymore. They have lore.

An influencer doesn’t just make videos. They have lore.

A random person who went viral for saying something funny can suddenly have lore.

Even internet jokes have lore.

There is something oddly satisfying about knowing the backstory. Once you know it you’re not just watching a video anymore. You’re in on the joke!

And I think that’s why internet culture moves so fast — that is part of it!

A meme isn’t just a funny picture. It can be an entire story that people add to, change and reference later on. People who study internet memes call them cultural pieces because they spread from person to person and change as they move through online communities.

Basically the internet is always creating its own little mythology.

Think how fast a random person can become a character.

Someone gets filmed at a concert.

Someone has a funny reaction at a sporting event.

Someone says something completely ridiculous on TikTok.

Someone’s old tweet suddenly gets reposted.

At first we might only know one thing about them.

Then people start searching.

Who are they?

Where did they come from?

What else have they posted?

Have they always been like this?

Suddenly there are whole accounts of what happened.

And this is where I think things start to get a little strange.

Because sometimes these people aren’t celebrities.

They’re just people who happened to be on the internet at some point.

Yet we can become invested in their lives.

We know their names. We know their faces. We know their relationships. We know the drama from six months ago. We know what happened to their ex. We know why they stopped posting.

We know the lore.

It’s similar to how we follow celebrities, except social media makes it so much faster and more personal. Research on celebrity culture shows people can develop parasocial relationships with celebrities (we feel connected to people who don’t actually know us).

And social media took that idea even further.

We don’t have to be fans of someone to know everything about them.

Sometimes we don’t even like them.

We may actively dislike a celebrity but we still know their entire dating history.

We might think an influencer is annoying but we watch every update about their latest drama.

We might say “I don’t even care about this” when we send our friends the latest update.

That’s one of the funniest things about internet culture to me.

Not caring can still get a lot of attention.

I think part of the reason we love lore is because it makes the internet feel like a community.

Knowing the reference means you are part of something.

You understand why everyone is laughing.

You recognize the person in the video.

You know what happened before.

You can add your own joke or opinion.

It’s almost like being on an inside joke with millions of people.

But there’s also something uncomfortable about how quickly we turn real people into characters.

Once someone is “internet lore” it’s easy to forget they are still real person living a life outside of our screens.

We know their story because other people collected bits of it, reposted it, joked about it and turned it into content.

At some point the person can almost disappear behind the character we’ve created around them.

And maybe that’s the strangest part.

The internet doesn’t give us information anymore.

It gives us stories.

It takes a random moment, gives it a backstory, characters, running jokes — millions of people have something to watch for.

Maybe that’s why the internet needs lore.

Because humans have always loved stories. We just found a way to make them together (in real time) with millions of strangers.

And next time someone says “You don’t know the lore?” tell them so.

I’ll probably look it up.

Because, unfortunately, I need to know now.