While most of what goes on there hinges somewhere between vile and horrible. 4chan has a lot of good in it, plenty of times there can be surprisingly good and high quality debates.
And come on, it's where all the memes are born. That's profound. What other startup can claim to be such a big influence on western society?
PPS: sometimes they even manage to count to 10. I think the record was 100.
edit: when I say meme, I mean "A meme ( /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena." ... I don't mean, "funny picture".
I think you (and probably many others) are conflating 4chan with its /b/ board. There are several communities with their own "ecosystem" within 4chan, even if there's some overlap of course.
Also, it wouldn't be fair to attribute all the things you've cited to 4chan only. Something Aweful contributed to the birth of many "early" memes for instance. And I think the rage comics were infamously made popular by reddit (4chan had "MS paint comics" and such).
Something Awful and Newgrounds were a good place to spawn memes back in the early-ish days of the web. When memes were still flash videos and such.
And even before that (or possibly not before that), I remember going to emule to download what were essentially memes. A lot of them spreading partially via email.
But I think in the least 8 years, 4chan has really become the main birthplace of memes.
4chan was arguably born out of a combination of the FYAD (fuck you and die) and the ADTRW (anime death tentacle rape whorehouse) subforums at something awful.
ADTRW was just the anime forum. The admins called it that to annoy the anime kids. They would all hang out on 2chan, the japanese precursor to 4chan.
FYAD was the forum with no rules. It was (is?) basically /b/ but this is back in the day so it was much smaller, everyone knew everyone else. It was basically a little clique that would sit there making injokes.
I never really went in there, but the notable thing about it was that the mods would constantly abuse the css and js on the forum theme to the extent that it would often crash some browsers. It was pretty funny. Oh, and there was always one mod who was elected from the userbase every month, the "idiot king" who would rule with an iron fist. In short, like online gaming, it would be great in theory except for the fact that everyone else there is an antisocial teenage nerd.
Rage comics are just "MS paint comics" with recurring characters and a set format- which makes sense given that reddit is a less chaotic alternative to 4chan. Of course, the chaotic nature of 4chan is not a bad thing.
Also, the memes that originate elsewhere are still made popular due to 4chan's influence. e.g. "trollface" apparently comes from deviantart but is commonly used in rage comics (I think).
There are a few similar comic artists. Notably 3-Angled-Blue, who drew some amazing MS Paint comics that are slowly being made into rage comic templates.
You can't do the math yourself? Rage comics were a thing in 2008. It was dead and buried by the time redditards decided to fornicate with its corpse in 2009.
Influence on Western Culture? Why don't you go read the news, the Patterson break-up has had more of an effect on Western culture then 4Chan could ever hope to succeed.
Some people spend way too much time on the internet; I can guarantee you that 99% of America, has no clue what 4Chan, Rage Comics, lolcats is. Anonymous and the 1% movement (but you may have to say Occupy Wall Street to the 3 million remaining people) may be the exceptions because of the media coverage.
And meme's are far from profound, humor, yes you could argue to be considered profound, but meme's? A silly time-waster at best but generally worse then a joke told among friends. You can't find a meme and share it with friends with the same impact (whether online or in person) as:
One day little girl comes home from school, "Mom, today some boy showed me his penis."
Mother exclaims "What?!"
Little girl says "Yea, and it sort of reminded me of a peanut."
Trying not to laugh, mother asks "Is that because it was so small?"
Little girl laughs says "No. Because it tasted so salty."
I can't believe I'm saying this but it's almost offensive to me that you're comparing 4chan to celebrity news. 4chan is friggin' high art compared to that shit. Celebrity news is the lowest of the low; nothing but easy-to-read brain candy for bored, boring housewives.
And I think 4chan has a huge influence. It is a very powerful site in tech culture, which is pretty large I think. Tech culture might be smaller by numbers than the so-called mainstream but it's plenty large enough to be self-sustaining and have its own sense of identity.
The argument isn't that 4chan doesn't have its own identity, its refuting this:
And come on, it's where all the memes are born. That's profound. What other startup can claim to be such a big influence on western society?
I think 4chan definitely has a huge influence on the tech sector, but in terms of straight-up 'influence' vastly more people follow celebrity gossip than memes. That might change (it probably won't -- we're prone to hero-worship, whether or not its movie stars or tech icons).
Celebrity news is the lowest of the low; nothing but easy-to-read brain candy for bored, boring housewives.
I don't really read celebrity news, but I have read rage comics and memes back when Reddit had them frontpaged, and if you think they're more than easy-to-read brain candy, I think you're mistaken.
There is a chain. There is the World Wide Web, which is a mass indiscriminate content creator. Then you have 4chan, which functions as both an individual content creator on the WWW, and as a giant aggregator. 4chan users aggregate funny pictures they recontextualize from bad advertising, screenshots of incomprehensible dialog in TV shows, the best webcomics, etc. 4chan is a mostly a massive dumping ground filled with garbage, but because of the ephemeral nature of threads, result in only content that frequently gets reposted has a chance to survive the churn. Most people cannot stand this, and stay away. But 4chan is populated by content-addicted denizens, who process, filter and promote good memes. And then turn right around and push this content back out onto the more "respectable" and filtered, less-chaotic sites like Reddit and CheezeBurger Network, Facebook, which are meme-propagating machines in their own right. But they primarily get access to the content that was subjected to the vicious selection process of 4chan to begin with.
I think the process by which 4chan operates in media is far more sophisticated, less centralized, less commercial and (perhaps surprisingly) less cynical than celebrity gossip that is created en-masse for money by large national media corporations for top-down consumption. By the time a meme makes it to facebook it's been largely stripped of its participatory power and becomes a one-way medium, but that's just at the periphery of the meme-propogation, the people that just consume it with their electronic feed tubes. But the process of creating this content before it gets to the edge web is a chaotic, churning process of evolutionary competition, mutation, selection.
This is worthy of study. It is participatory culture in the making, what the creative commons and the free culture movement always wanted. There may not be a lot _fundamentally_ new here, except in the context of the 'net in which it is being created. And the medium shapes the message. The web is a "new place." and there are people in it that are, right now, creating the native language of a place that has never existed before. These are exciting times. I think that the messageboard one day will be recognized for it importannce in the history of the WWW, and the Internet in general.
That's a pretty brash claim. Shakespeare's been around for centuries, and has most likely been read or seen by more people in the sum of that time than celebrity news.
You forget, more people have lived since the end of the second world war, than lived between then and Shakespeare's time. If you also take into account the rise in global literacy, far more people will have read celebrity news than Shakespeare.
My guess is that anyone who is literate has read Shakespeare at least once. I have to imagine my public schooling is not that different from the norm, and I read at least 3 works as required (Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo & Juliet) and some other others as my choice for assignments.
At least, in the western world. I don't know how popular Shakespeare is outside of that. On the other hand, I don't know how popular celebrity news is either.
Monty Python was a silly joke, something friends would communicate amongst each other. It was a meme inside the UK, eventually sort of going global.
40 years since The Holy Grail was filmed, it is still often selected as the funniest film of all times.
There is an impact. But it is a young people's thing, give it some time and it will become part of the cultural heritage of the early 2000's and 2010's.
The thing is though, basically everyone worldwide who has been to university in the last few years has seen them and knows about them, and has laughed at them.
When those people grow up, and achieve control over the popular media, suddenly we'll start seeing references to this period of culture in the new media of the day. It'll be seen as much more important than it is now as well, as the educated middle classes exert their control over cultural memory.
Also at some point the children of todays students will likely decide that memes and early internet culture in general is retro, and it'll all be vogue again, and we can complain that it's not as good when its holographic or something.
This can be seen in music. Jazz used to be a scary sound that would cause your daughters to start having sex with black people, now it's the height of sophistication. At some point in the last 15 years hip-hop became an art form in the eyes of the media elite. The current resurgence in commercial rave music is partly to do with the veterans of the 90s scene being in a position to start large businesses. At some point in the future the extreme, venetian snares end of electronica will likely be looked upon as jazz/classical is now.
>suddenly we'll start seeing references to this period of culture in the new media of the day
It is already starting, just look at this job offer (it's German, but you'll understand the reference to rage comics at once):
While I get your point, I think much more than 1% of America is aware of the entity that is rage comics/lolcats/image macros. Pretty much every kid on the Internet these days knows what those things are or has seen them and is thus aware of them. The number will only increase.
Assuming, like you, that by "the 1% movement" we're talking about Occupy, then it should be pointed out that it was birthed by Adbusters. 4Chan had nothing to do with it, except in a very peripheral sense that could also be claimed by hundreds of other sites/groups/organizations.
I can guarantee you that 99% of America, has no clue what 4Chan, Rage Comics, lolcats is
I'm a high school teacher. I can guarantee you that 99% of kids 13-18 know what Rage Comics & lolcats are. The youth of today are the first Internet generation. They have spent their entire lives immersed in Internet culture. The true impact of this generation will start to be felt in 10-15 years.
Who's Patterson? The personal lives of celebrities tend to not make it into history. 4chan is at the very least the other guy who invented the telephone (or am I thinking light bulb) but got beat to the patent office.
"loving LOLcats or rickrolling as outputs is like loving a tasty hamburger; visiting 4chan is like visiting the meat factory. At some point, it’d probably help to visit the meat factory, but that might make you go vegetarian."
For some reason, your nickname strikes me as hilarious. I hereby present: "joshu investigates"
---
A surfing editor named Anderson asked the moot the URL to his imageboard, a place popularly supposed to give insight into humanity's character. The old moot said, "Go straight to /b/." After he typed several characters, the moot said to himself, 'He also is a common b-tard.'
This incident was told to joshu who said, 'Wait until I investigate.' The next day he went and asked moot the same question, and moot gave the same reply.
You are literally the first person to get my username.
The underlying joke is that those who have met me realize that I am in no way a zen monk. I am more of an anti-Buddhist, seeking to achieve a state of complete Worry.
This whole "4chan is vile and horrible" thing is getting old. 4chan is not /b/, and vice versa. There are a lot of boards on 4chan that are perfectly normal, with no gore threads/porn/etc.
Aren't most of those boards invaded pretty regularly?
Also, some of the boards are full of people who can be described as insane- despite not having porn/gore/etc. For example, /g/. I don't agree that it's inaccurate to say 4chan is vile in general, and I certainly agree with the sentiment that 4chan is the best and worst of the internet- or at least the social part of the internet.
/x/ (paranormal) is pretty bad lately. The problem with /x/ is inconsistency. It seems to happen in bursts. A rare really good thread tends to inspire more good threads for a while, you get few days to a week of good content.
I realize mods on 4chan is a touchy subject, but /x/ could use a good mod that deleted excessively repetitive threads. there are some boards where that's not such a big deal, and some boards that thrive on repetitive and troll threads (I'm thinking of 4chan's pressure release valve, /pol/). But /x/ would be better served by having a mod conscientious of, not so much curating good content or killing trolls, but deleting the EXTREMELY repetitive threads that inevitably go nowhere.
Also, it is a matter of opinion if the roleplayers are a problem. I would argue that the lazy, bad roleplayers are the problem. I think they add color when they're good. Part of the excitement of /x/ is that it exists on the fuzzy periphery between fact and fiction.
But why would I go out of my way to visit a place that has that stuff on it in the first place? So I can be associated with sociopaths? I'll pass and get my content elsewhere.
What do you mean by "place"? And why would you be associated with people on the boards you don't visit? (Also basically everyone on those boards are anonymous so you won't have an identity to "associate".)
Sure, but I still don't understand your reason. Do you avoid using Google because there's disturbing content on it? or Wikipedia because sociopaths also visit it? or Netflix because it's hosted on the same platform as a bunch of malware? or bittorrent because it's used for copyright infringement?
Why are you avoiding parts of 4chan because you don't like other parts?
I don't think you're catching my drift so I'll just come out and say it - I don't want to be tracked by my government going to a site that is a known gathering spot for criminals and juveniles just so I can see some silly pictures, thereby associating myself with criminals and juveniles. Now we can split hairs about whether that's true but perception is reality. So let's just end it here - I won't visit 4chan and it's not a big deal.
You can access 4chan through Tor, now. It used to be blocked, but now only blocks posting.
Additionally, there is an HTTPSEverywhere definition (you have to specially get it from their website) that forces all the 4chan content through SSL to prevent snooping by exit nodes.
Download and place the file in the HTTPSEverywhereUserRules/ subdirectory in your Firefox profile directory. In Tor Browser bundle, the location for your profile is: {wherever you installed tbb}/Data/profile
When you're in TBB, navigate to http://4chan.org. If it doesn't switch to https automatically, then click the HTTPSEverywhere icon up in the corner, and make sure the 4chan.org rule is checked. Page should refresh, you should see that it is now https.
[citation needed] on 4chan producing memes that are more than comics and cat pictures. Anonymous, sure. 1% movement? Ehh I need some proof.
"And come on, it's where all the memes are born." It is not where all of the memes are born, much less the useful ones. If you claim otherwise, please tell me what I am missing.
Ok, sorry, I have to admit I knew it was still up. Claiming it was taken down is a classic tactic for getting people to click through. You've been RickRoll'd. (I'm not proud of it.)
Speaking of influential, check out the extensive Wikipedia page on the meme. The RickRoll has showed up in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade (with Rick Astley in person), a video from Nancy Pelosi, and a tweet from the White House Twitter feed. It is fully part of the pop culture.
One prominent non-cat/comic meme isn't quite on the influence level of what Swizec was trying to make 4chan out to be.
My point is that he is vastly overstating its influence. The millions of 4chan users have produced _maybe_ as much influence as a single pop music star.
4chan doesn't create stuff any more, maybe back in ~2004 when it was the "primary" location to find "internet culture" that was true, but nowadays it's spread out all across the internet. Even the majority of things credited to 4chan didn't "start" at 4chan.
> edit: when I say meme, I mean "A meme ( /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena." ... I don't mean, "funny picture"
Don't you see? The fact that meme now connotes a "funny picture" is itself a meme.
Memes are profound because they are our culture. It is what the "young people of today" do. In the 50's they had rock-and-roll, in the 60's it was hippies and so on.
Right now, it's the internet. In just a few more years all of us will become "the old guys" and our younger brothers and sisters will come up with something new - my sister already thinks I'm lame for liking the internet so much and sharing silly pictures and stuff. And she doesn't understand why cats are so cool. She's only 7 years younger.
The thing is, you have to look at memes in a broader sense than just "picture of X with something written on top and on bottom in big bold text". Yes, that's what some people call a "meme" these days, but I mean them more in the sense of a cultural parcel that is distributed between people in a common-ish medium.
I remember in primary school one of the memes (called fads back then) was that everyone suddenly started using yo-yos. Anyone who was between 10 and 14 had a yoyo and you could instantly connect with them, there was instantly something to talk about. Etc.
But here's the real kicker, the memes of today are the first in history that are trully global. And without delay. It took almost 10 years for hippies to arrive in my neck of the woods and they were never pretty big. Punk was a big quicker, it had a delay of only a few years.
Modern culture, mostly the memes, has zero delay. And that's amazing.
For the past 5 years at least, all young people are computer people. Only some are geeks, but they are all immersed in computerized communications every day.
It's the closest we've got because culture at large is much more heterogeneous than it was 50 years ago. In the 60's, you had 3 channels on TV and had to go to a physical record store to buy music.
That's not the same generation of consumers though. About a decade or so apart in age I reckon.
I bet hippies weren't too big or popular with the 12 year old crowd either when they were at their peak.
And BTW, Justin Bieber IS an internet meme. He was made famous through a youtube video clip that got him the attention of big producers, a contract and eventually "real" fame.
I don't think memes are profound, but I do think that having this crucible in which new memes are created, with the best spreading from there to the rest of the internet via Tumblr, Facebook, etc. is pretty awe inspiring.
I share your sentiment, although I did not dislike them originally. In their native version they were simple four paneled MS paint comics. Since you had three panes to preamble the rage they called in for a lot of innovation and unexpected humor. Today, they have become pagelong mundane personal stories -uninteresting incidents and people being stupid/perverted- told entirely with stock images.
* lolcats
* rage comics
* anonymous
* a lot of the 1% movement
* getting random people in jail because they think animal cruelty is funny
* making Moot TIME's person of the year and getting him a TED talk -> http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...
While most of what goes on there hinges somewhere between vile and horrible. 4chan has a lot of good in it, plenty of times there can be surprisingly good and high quality debates.
And come on, it's where all the memes are born. That's profound. What other startup can claim to be such a big influence on western society?
PS: 4chan has also invented a clever sorting algorithm - http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1295544154
PPS: sometimes they even manage to count to 10. I think the record was 100.
edit: when I say meme, I mean "A meme ( /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena." ... I don't mean, "funny picture".
A lot of responders misunderstood this, I think.