Can the Internet be an ethnicity?
I've been online all my life, I genuinely feel at home here. I relate more to random strangers across the world than any neighbors. Is it wrong for me to think of the (western/English) Internet as my culture?
Cultural background isn't the same as ethnicity. But yeah I'd say online spaces can act as sort of a secondary cultural background. Where you live will still most likely have an impact on your preferences, general knowledge, belief system and so on but there are numerous factors that make up a person's cultural background.
Not to mention determine which watch list you'd get put on.
They largely are, ethnicity is culture (tradition, language, customs, beliefs) and history.
I do not relate culturally to the people where I live, I have far more in common in beliefs and values with the typical terminally online compared to people where I grew up. And I've been online since the Internet started, so I've got the history too.
Ethnicity is absolutely not culture.
For example, a buddy of mine is Asian but he was adopted by a white family at birth so he is culturally No different than any other [white] guy from the Midwest.
Or, alternatively, there's nothing stopping me from experiencing, learning about, and practicing cultural practices from another area of the world even though I am ethnically "just" white.
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people that perceives to be different from out-groups based on shared attributes. These attributes include having a common language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, religion, history, or social treatment.[
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicity
Yes it is.
You're describing your friends genetics or ancestry being different to their ethnicity or culture. Asian or White are not ethnicities.
Asian or white are not ethnicities
Not according to any real Census Bureau
First off that page is literally titled "About the Topic of Race", clearly not ethnicity.
And why are you linking to an American census bureau if you want a real one? We all know America uses words differently to the rest of the world.