How neckbeards have become a screen stereotype

Take the music video for the Ariana Grande song One Last Time as an example.

A colourful comet tears up the sky and Ariana pushes her way through a crowd of stargazers, ending up inside a residential building. In a dingy apartment, an overweight, bearded and distinctly dishevelled man stands at a bank of computer monitors.

The Grande video, viewed nearly 200 million times on YouTube already, exists as a brief mainstream portrayal of a distinct stereotype of an Internet user: the neckbeard.

A pejorative term that entered the Oxford Online dictionary in 2014, neckbeard describes a physically unkempt man, so named because of his facial hair. Unlike the stylishly cultivated scruff worn by men at the vanguard of fashion, the neckbeard also has hair in places other than the face: notably his neck.

At home in the basement

More than mere chin hair, the neckbeard is fat, is unattractive – perhaps even troll-like in his actions and his aesthetics – and is at home in a filthy basement, sweating it up in front of a screen. The computer...