Warning: Many of the following images are memes. I haven’t given the sources because I don’t think copyright is an issue where memes are concerned.
Some of you may have seen this. It’s a plan to manipulate scores of lonely single men to unwittingly form a “Forever Alone Involuntary Flashmob.” Forever Alone refers to a meme in which a comically-tearful potato-shaped face finds itself in situations where it ends up alone. The plan was to get these lonely men to arrive in Times Square on the evening of May 13, expecting to meet an attractive girl (in reality a fake OKCupid profile). The results would then be streamed live via public webcams, providing the perpetrators and spectating netizens with a mean-spirited laugh. (It worked.)
Forever Alone Guy, or me around 3 A.M.
Forever Alone is an example of a meme. The Wall Street Journal describes memes as online viral videos and concepts, and cites Richard Dawkins in its definition; Dawkins refers to memes as units of cultural information — an idea, a practice, a phrase, a video — that spread virally. One example is the famous LOLcat, arguably the Internet’s top meme. A LOLcat is usually a funny picture of a cat with white text (caps lock, Impact font) in deliberately misspelt English. Catspeak, if you will. Another, more tired meme is the “Rickroll”, where victims click on a link but are redirected to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The forum 4chan gathers millions of anonymous posters in conversation to foster a meme-rich environment: an innocuous byproduct of this is the Cheezburger Network, a popular meme empire that has even spawned merchandise.
A LOLcat.
Many memes have their roots in 4chan. I previously posted about Tumblr, a microblogging community. Today’s post will concern Tumblr’s meaner, frat-boy older brother: 4chan. You may have heard of them from their infamous takeover of the Time 100. 4chan is a hive mind, a deadly combination of teen angst, Pedobear and cat photos.
4chan was inspired by 2chan, a Japanese bulletin board. Each page on 4chan features photos and text; anonymous users post images or text requests to start discussions on a variety of subjects, and other users respond (WSJ). There are over 500 posts per minute on 4chan, all from anonymous users; the site’s lack of registration measures, archives or search engines means that 4chan does delete what you post and prevent others from finding you. (It’s more than can be said for many social networks or even blogging communities like Tumblr, where reblogs tend to keep posts alive.) This default anonymity may be the reason for the site’s success, as it allows “unfettered creativity [without] individual accountability”, making it a perfect haven for creative spirits and — unfortunately, for egalitarianism means that just about everyone has a say — cyber-bullies and people who post shock images.
All rights reserved by 4chan.
4chan is one of the world’s largest active forums, with millions of visitors and pageviews every day. A third of its traffic (over 200 million views a month) goes to /b/, a general interest board simply titled ‘Random’. Non-/b/-users — many of whom do discuss travel, film, anime, photography and graphics — refer to the /b/ posters as /b/tards (NY Times). Truly, /b/ is the Internet equivalent of a public high school bathroom. It is a board of trolls, or people who disrupt communities for personal pleasure. On /b/, people talk about anything: hacking, multiple genres of pornography, shock images involving human and animal genitalia, and complaints about everyday lives (Vanity Fair). Also, there are many cats. /b/ is 4chan’s Fight Club. It’s full of angry men with great capacity to troll, and you’re not supposed to talk about it if you’re a user. /b/, however, has a great deal of clout in cyberspace: they once rigged an online poll with votes for Justin Bieber to be sent to North Korea on his world tour, and caused the shares of Apple Inc. to drop by $10 simply by spreading a rumour of its founder suffering a heart attack.
/b/ is a force to be reckoned with. While largely populated by bored netizens with sophomoric senses of humour, in it for the lulz (a corruption of LOL with elements of schadenfreude), 4chan and /b/ have also spawned Anonymous, a group of deadly hackers who have crashed major international websites over the blocking of WikiLeaks. They get together and decide who to destroy and how (BusinessInsider). They do this through DDoS attacks — a distributed denial-of-service attack in the form of mass requests to crash certain web servers. Ten original posters (OPs) are able to launch attacks, but if they abuse their power over other users, they are locked out. Yet Anonymous is not a group with a leader-follower hierarchy per se, as not all members are participants in every project — it depends on who’s awake. The Economist called this a 24-hour Athenian democracy. Anonymous is elusive and decentralised, making them difficult to locate: in the words of one of The Economist’s interviewees, “We are Everywhere. We are everyone. We are Anonymous.”
I would like to end on a cheerful note, so let us return to the topic of memes…
Grace Takes on Net Comm. 