LEARNING OUT COME

Understand...

I want to be able to understand people in more depth depending on the emotions they chose to convey in their writing.

4chan!!!

/b/

In North America there are over three hundred million internet users and each of them are affected by the content seen, many without even realizing it. This has many affects on Pop Culture by defining aspects of humor, fashion, and language. One example of this is a site called 4chan.org. 4chan is a hub for some of the foulest, skuzziest, and funniest stuff on the internet. Much of what originates on 4chan in a single post spreads to be what 4chaners call a “meme” or internet sensation that spreads like wildfire. What's interesting is that the people who are behind this part of the developing pop culture are a very small group of internet users. Whether people realize it or not the content of 4chan has most likely touched their lives at some point. This concept of the minority affecting the majority is seen all throughout life, 4chan is one clear example of this.

The structure of 4chan is very unconventional compared to most public online forums, and it could easily appear to have absolutely no rule at all. “Unlike most boards, 4chan doesn’t require posters to register which leads to a lot of uninhibited behavior” (Grossman 1). In most online boards there are moderators and site administrators who watch the flow of content and keep the posts that accumulate about a topic related to the topic at hand, this is not the case with 4chan. However, there are rules that the users expect other users to follow which they have deemed “The Rules of the Internet”. All of these are basically nonsense that no one outside of the 4chan board would understand because they are longstanding jokes from the board its self. If there is a post on 4chan that the community decides is unworthy of being on the boards they will comment on old posts to bring them to the front page until that post is knocked back ten pages and lost forever, deeming it “pwned” the internet “lol speak” of the word owned. This is an example of the community of 4chaners ironically trying to control chaos with chaos.

4chan has many negative stigmas that outside groups such as the mass media, The Church of Scientology, and some people of power attach to it. 4chan’s /b/ or the random image board can be the worst and funniest image board on the site. /b/ was originally the launching site of raids against whoever “anonymous” felt they could have the most fun with, including the one group they are constantly attacking, The Church of Scientology. “Anonymous, the loosely defined community surrounding 4chan.org's "random" image board (called /b/), is many things to many people. It's an elite hacker network, an internet hate machine, a group of know-nothings, a cabal of know-it-alls, a cesspool of hatred and a shining city on a hill”(Croop 1). One of Anonymous’ most infamous hacking operations of an influential person was of Sarah Palin’s e-mail a week before her debate with Joe Biden. Since Anonymous is always attacking the Church of Scientology, one of their most notable attacks on CoS main webpage was when they brought it down for around twenty three hours costing The Church of Scientology millions of dollars. On top of this, when the Church’s computer technicians brought it back up, the Anonymous hackers made the screen flash black and white for another two hours and gave a couple people seizures which they sadly took pride in; they declared it an “epic win”.

Despite the fact that for the most part the things on 4chan are vile and immature, the things that actually come out of 4chan tend to be pretty funny to most. For example, possibly the most famous meme prank called a “Rick Roll” is very popular. A Rick Roll is sending a link to someone that appears to be something interesting, but is really the music video to “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astely. Sadly the Rick Roll officially on “June 21st 2007: Carson Daly force “rickrolled” everyone on his show. Since it was forced upon a passive audience, the Rick Roll died an OLDMEME death in the eyes of anyone cool.” Along with Rick Rolling, there are other things such as “LOL cats”, the most famous one being a cat looking desperately at the camera with the caption “I can has cheezburger?” These are just two examples of things that originated in 4chan, a relatively small community that swept the internet quickly and have continued to be considered funny for a long time. There are over 9000 more things similar to Rick Rolling and LOL cats, and all they all demonstrate the power that 4chan has as a community to define internet humor.

In the world and the internet a small community of people can always affect the larger population, whether the affecting or the affected realizes it or not. This is especially apparent with 4chan and how it affects the internet’s culture as a whole. Now obviously websites such as Facebook or Myspace pop culture is prevailing and is facilitated by the users through communication. However, on 4chan pop culture changes the users and is changed by them, Time magazine once said, “Coarse as it is, 4chan has no rival as a hothouse for memes; they're bred and refined, and then they can escape and run amuck through the culture at large. For better or for worse, this is what the counterculture looks like today: raw, sarcastic, bare of any social or political agenda but frequently funny as hell” (Grossman 2). If cultures can be changed by a minor group then there is no better example of this than 4chan.org its self.




Works Cited

Croop, Steven. “Hit Them Where They Live.” The Escapist. (25 Nov. 2008). 26 May. 2009.
.
Grossman, Lev. “The Master of Memes.” Time 09 July 2008: 23-24.
Know Your Meme: The Rickroll. Dir. ROCKETBOOM. Perf. Jaime Dubs. MP4. Youtube, 2007. Film.