I am against style, I am closer to discourse. Regarding the internet analogy I would say that what happened with video and photography is what we can now distinguish as the way new media appear in the arts. These three relatively recent media are interesting to analyze. They are not, like painting, originally art media. Photography in its origin was more like visual anthropology, it was used for representation instead of previous media.
Artists are a minority in the history of photography.
Some people then started to use video as an art medium. When the net appeared it was for the military, then it became academic and after a few years some artists started to see that there was a space they could use, connect to and activate. I would like to refer to other artforms that are connected to this, like mail art and correspondence art. There were a lot of networks. I was participating in that period, in the seventies.