The purpose of the article is to substantiate the emergence of online culture as a new phenomenon of our time, the development of which was stimulated by the comprehensive approval of the online space as a space of existence of culture in the broad sense of this concept in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic with the reference to the cultural and philosophical ideas of the 20th-century thinkers (on the example of K. Jaspers, J. Ortega y Gasset and W. Benjamin’s ideas) and the 21st-century thinkers (on the example of E. Schmidt, J. Cohen and U. Eco’s ideas). The article outlines the main prerequisites for its rise and argues favouring the concept of “online culture” in its own right. Today, a new cultural phenomenon is being actively formed, which we mean as “online culture”. The impetus for its rapid development was the challenges common to all humanity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which stimulated the active search for new forms and opportunities for selfrealisation and communication by the world community. Online culture is a voluminous and multi-component phenomenon, and it has every reason to become a characteristic of contemporary culture and a new cultural form. The study uses elements of methods of hermeneutical reading of texts, comparative historical and cultural analysis of texts, as well as the method of participant observation. Conclusions. The study results show that a new stage of cultural development is currently being formed, which the authors of the study called “online culture”. The emergence of such a new cultural reality is closely linked to the online environment and digital forms of representation of cultural products. It is demonstrated that predictive reasoning about its occurrence took place in cultural and philosophical studios of the 20th and the 21st centuries, overcoming pandemic challenges by humanity; its entry becomes the realities of the present. The concept of “online culture” correlates with other cultural phenomena close to it in content and forms of representation, such as “information culture”, “digital culture”, “virtual culture”, etc. Still, it exists independently and denotes a fundamentally different cultural cross-section of the present. Now online culture is in its infancy, but the pace of its formation, inspired by the exponential development of the online space, is swift.