Forms

Abbreviation

Abbreviation - shortened form of a written word or phrase used in place of the whole word or phrase. For example, “Amt” is an abbreviation for “amount.”

Acronym

Acronym - a word (such as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term.

Emoticon

Emoticon - a group of keyboard characters (such as :-)) that typically represents a facial expression or suggests an attitude or emotion and that is used especially in computerized communications (such as e-mail).

Emoji

Emoji - any of various small images, symbols, or icons used in text fields in electronic communication (as in text messages, e-mail, and social media) to express the emotional attitude of the writer, convey information succinctly, communicate a message playfully without using words, etc. See emojipedia.

ASCII art

ASCII art - text art is one of the arts enabled by the computer age. It’s about making text pictures with text symbols. For example, =^.^=, ʕ•́ᴥ•̀ʔっ.

Origins

SMS

Limit of characters for SMS stimulated usage of shorter forms of common phrases, for example, ASAP (as soon as possible), 2 (to), 4 (for), y (why), r (are), u (you), etc.

Chats

The need to type fast stimulated usage of shorter forms of common phrases, for example, brb (be right back), AFK (away from keyboard), etc.

Text is a poor medium for casual conversation because a lot of nonverbal information is lost (gestures, facial expression, voice tone, body language), to compensate this people come up with emoticons, for example, :-). Later idea of emoticons transformed into Emojis.

Forums

Online communities gave birth to a lot of slang and phenomena jargon, for example troll (someone who deliberately pisses people off online to get a reaction), lurker (someone that follows the forum but doesn’t post).

Memes

Meme

1. an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.
2. an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.

Some internet slang refers to memes.

Technological jargon

When you deal with the internet you have to face some technological jargon, for example, router, switch, network, domain, handle, etc.