On Internet Reporting

How does one write about the Internet? He asked, rhetorically.
It’s fair to say that the majority of whatever target audience you’re writing for knows what the Internet is, and what you can use it for. But when you get into the area of Internet culture, where do you start?
I came across these difficulties in writing an article about memes for “Ink”. Your average message board patron, even if they haven’t heard the term “meme”, will at least grasp the concept. They will have been inundated with “LOLcats” and been “Rickrolled” more times than they care to mention. They may have even created a “Demotivational” or two.
But as widespread as the internet is, relatively few people have waded very far into the black intellectual wasteland that is your average internet forum or blog. Few have the patience, let alone the will.
This is a common problem in any topic you write about I suppose. But the demographics of the Internet don’t really follow any predictable pattern. As British computer science academic Garry Marshall writes in his paper “The Internet and Memetics”, “Virtual communities are not structured in the same way as real-world communities. Constraints of geography and status do not come into play: what matters is a common interest.”
In other words, the demographics of traditional media don’t conform to Internet demographics. So there’s no way I can assume that ANY demographic knows what I’m talking about when I say “LOLcats” or “Rickrolling”.
The super-geek in me wants to talk about the implications of memes in regards to Internet culture; something which is seriously under-examined. But if I skip definitions and examples of memes, it’s like trying to teach somebody chess strategy when they don’t know the rules.
It's one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" things. Regardless of what I do, a section of the "Ink" readership is going to feel either patronized or lost.
One more thing about Internet reporting: the “best” source for this topic is really Wikipedia. Though I can already fell the scowls of professors everywhere, I will only say that the “experts” on Internet culture are exactly the kind of people that would take the time to write a Wikipedia article in the first place.
You won’t find an expert on the history of the ORLY owl on any faculty list in any university in the world. And even if you could, why bother? The Wikipedia article on that subject will tell you exactly the same thing. In researching the meme piece, I read an article from a legitimate news organization that actually quoted Wikipedia.
Okay, it was FOX News. But still…

“O brave new world! That has such people in't!”
-William Shakespeare, The Tempest, (presumably talking about internet forums)