I had such a good time at Computers & Writing last year, I presented again this year! Current ambition: to make a name for myself, for now anyway, as “that 4chan girl.”
Originally written for a grad school course, a version of this piece was published later in enculturation. Access copy of the talk below.
“Meanwhile, in an entirely different thread”: Reading 4chan as cybertext
Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information
Computers & Writing, Raleigh, NC
May 19, 2012
I would like to begin with two particularly illustrative ontological encounters with 4chan that should give you a sense of its brand of cybertextual immersion. First, in the 2007 thread for which this presentation is named, one of 4chan’s collective avatars, Epic Fail Guy or “EFG,” appeared on the Random – /b/ board and was exhorted to kill himself. He attempted to do so, failed as was expected, left, then returned but flinched at the final moment so that the gun fired into the air and he walked away unscathed. Meanwhile, in a post time-stamped thirteen seconds later in another thread, the 4chan mascot Pedobear was randomly shot, to the confusion of those present in that thread. This confusion was mitigated only when perusers of the EFG thread began posting, “oh fuck, no way this is efg!” and “EFG KILLED PEDOBEAR,” linking back to the EFG thread for those who had not witnessed it.
Case 2: on September 28, 2008, an Anonymous user on the Anime – /a/ board uploaded a screenshot of characters from the 2006 anime Code Geass in a post numbering 15061604. The accompanying text comment noted with astonishment: “Holy shit CC has been watching Lelouch from the very beginning.” Ensuing replies such as “wow Anon you’re pretty slow,” and “welcome to 2 years ago” denigrated the user’s ignorance. In a similar vein, one 4channer posted an image of Slowpoke, a Pokémon-based meme representing old or oversaturated information, and declared: “I don’t have a slowpoke slow enough for this. I’m going to mark your post number down, wait two years, then reply with slowpoke. See you in two years, sir.” Two years later to the day, an Anon on /a/ replied to the now-dead post link with an image of a Slowpoke with the Geass symbol inscribed in its left eye and the comment: “>>15061604 Everyone already knows that you dumbass.” Present users expressed confusion and denigrated the original poster, or OP, for a “fail reply” to a dead link. One user noted, “He’s trying to link a post literally 25 million posts ago; how could anyone possibly know what post he’s referring to?” However, 4channers emerged in this thread to prove that they did know, posting personally archived screenshots of the 2008 thread and praising OP for delivering on his promise. After this instance of shared knowledge construction, newer users and veteran users ignorant of the 2008 thread both declared themselves lucky to have stumbled on this “slice of history in the making.”
These particular slices of history are exceptionally illustrative of the arduousness of perusing threads and transforming information into knowledge on 4chan. When confronted with cryptic discourse, users ask others within the thread for prior reference points; they seek explanations on paratexts like 4chanarchive, Green Oval, Encyclopedia Dramatica, or Know Your Meme; they personally screen-capture the post in question and repost it on other boards in reliance on Anonymous’s collective institutional memory. Translating Pedobear’s death and the Slowpoke-Geass mashup image into useable cultural capital required the narrative sharing of historical knowledge by users in possession of this collective memory. Accordingly, 4channers who disseminate institutional memory comprise a demographic of “valuable users,” who, like the rest of 4chan’s population, are anonymous and fluctuating but were present at key developmental moments in 4chan’s history. To become a valuable user, Anonymous must maintain a consistent presence, peruse vast amounts of content, and develop a discerning eye for valuable cultural capital representative of 4chan’s history, deceptive and disruptive practices, and implicit social rules. Furthermore, where prior referents or proof of an assertion are lacking, Anonymous must seek out paratextual evidence or link to other boards to convert information to knowledge with institutional significance.
These properties, intrinsic to 4chan’s discourse, suggest that 4chan can only be read as what Aarseth terms a cybertext, where active engagement and nontrivial effort are pivotal to literary exchange and the manufacture of meaning. I argue that 4chan’s cybertextual and ludic qualities are imbricated in its production and preservation of institutional memory in a uniquely transient setting. 4channers’ ontological encounters with anonymity and ephemerality thus engender distinct discursive processes that supplement this institutional memory and lay down principles for future practices.
According to Aarseth, cybertexts hinge on both the mechanical organization of the text and the user’s immersive consumption of it. The medium is integral to the user’s ontological experience of the cybertext, ultimately rendering narrative unstable, uncertain, and aporetic. Cybertexts are ergodic and extranoematic in nature, where ergodic literature requires nontrivial effort to enter the text and extranoematic processes encompass physical effort that exceeds simple, linear eye-tracking or page-turning. It possesses verbal and paraverbal dimensions and intertextual references and may also rely on paratexts, hyperlinks, and collateration—or multiply viewable links between discrete collateral structures—that generate manifold narratives competing for dominance.
The cybertext is a “game-world-labyrinth,” wherein the primary tension is this struggle for narrative control, determined by the paths of user perusal and the architecture of the medium. Their chief aporia is the absence of possibility, the proverbial path less traveled by. This is especially true on imageboards like 4chan, which is anonymous, ephemeral, and highly contingent. Something as simple as the choice to open a link in the same tab as opposed to a new one or forgo refreshing an interesting thread every few seconds leads to radically different ontological experiences and acquisition of institutional memory on the part of the user. In this “game-world-labyrinth,” 4channers must therefore utilize distinct perusal strategies to maximize their thread intake, discernment of quality, and personal archives and increase their exposure to collective knowledge and acquire cultural capital to become valuable users themselves.
Created in October 2003, the imageboard 4chan is the largest English-language imageboard and the flagship of the Western *chans, all of which are characterized by their unique ephemerality and anonymity. Its primary purpose is for image sharing and discussion, and post content typically consists of an image and accompanying text comment, which often exhibits ludic qualities related to the site’s architecture. *chan imageboards lack even the option of registration and the default username, “Anonymous,” is a multiple-use, shared identity. Although modifiable, this identity is used by over 90% of users without the provision of other identifying information. Users who assume distinct identities are denigrated for failing to understand the ontological experience of anonymity. Content automatically refreshes at varying speeds on different boards and expired content is irrevocably deleted as the site lacks an archive. Since the majority of the site’s content is permanently removed, users rely on personal archival of material they judge worthy and institutional memory transmitted through group reminiscing and the sharing of historical knowledge, as paratextual archival is not guaranteed.
4chan has over fifty boards at the time of this writing, each of which is titled according to theme and assigned a letter within backslashes, such as Anime – /a/ or Random – /b/. Each board has sixteen pages of content numbered 0-15, and content is organized into discrete threads with image post limits of 152 per thread. Posting in a given thread “bumps” it towards page 0, resulting in increased visibility and likelihood of user participation. Lack of participation, or marking a thread “sage,” or “lower,” pushes the thread towards page 15 and causes it to disappear more rapidly. Discourse may also transcend the boundaries of threads and even boards, as role-play narratives and onsite trolling transpire across threads and may even span all fifty boards simultaneously or in chronological succession. Against the trend towards what Mayer-Schönberger called Web 2.0’s (quote) “perfect memory,” 4chan occupies an oddly forgetful space. Architected without memory or hierarchy, 4chan, perhaps more so than any cybertext, constantly reminds the reader of “inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know the exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed.”
According to Linde, who analyzed the role of narrative in institutional memory, an “institution” represented both formal and informal social groups with enduring existence. “Narrative” employed shared social history to establish legitimacy of authority, claim ownership, or create stability within the group. The forms these narratives assumed depended on the social resources and tacit norms to which the institution subscribed, forming texts whose coherence is not absolute but contingent on these relations. Linde construed the production and reception of these texts as a “social obligation which must be fulfilled in order for the participants to appear as competent members of their culture.” Competent members are the institution’s valuable users, those who retain knowledge of the institution’s past and appropriately and accurately deploy that historical awareness to influence its future.
The diffusion of discourse crucial to maintaining institutional history directly builds on Blackmore’s criteria for memetic replication, the primary means of historical preservation in ephemeral media environments like 4chan. Blackmore articulated three criteria that ensure quality replication of memes: fidelity, or high accuracy to the original iteration; fecundity, or fertile spread; and longevity, or the ability to endure in memory. The meme serves as the locus of memory on 4chan, but it is contravened by the culture’s exclusivity. Oversaturation of memes through memetic diffusion, where the meme is reproduced with particularly high fecundity and met with special disgust, neatly separates new users from veterans. New users are those who are surprised by old memes that have long since become so oversaturated and mainstream that they have lost their subversive, exclusive meaning. Due to high fecundity, memes like lolcats, Rickrolling, pretty cool guy, and John Cash have become the face of 4chan, when valuable users are those who possess less prominent, more obscure memes, ranging from the roll call meme “Itty bitty baby, itty bitty boat” to multi-track drifting, which requires intertextual facility with anime and fan-comics. Memes such as these are diffused primarily onsite and thus remain impenetrable to outsiders; those who understand and post such memes thus prove themselves valuable users who possess viable cultural capital. This is especially true regarding “slice of history” threads, like Slowpoke-Geass, activist activity permeating nonlinear multi-authored erotica about Julian Assange, or defacement of the Government of Tunisia’s webpage to read, “All your base are belong to us,” all of which are personally archived for preservation in collective memory. When performed with discretion and limitation, then, memetic diffusion spreads institutional knowledge to ensure its place in collective memory while policing oversaturated memes bereft of cultural capital.
Significantly, the unstable zero identity of Anonymous does not preclude self-satisfaction at others’ reactions or at the knowledge that one’s contribution will be immortalized in personal archives and future reposts. It also does not stop other 4channers from noting and praising a user for disseminating material worthy of memory. The implicit personal reward is akin to gameplay, as it suggests a lusory attitude based on overcoming obstacles such as 4chan’s culture of automatic dissent. In other words, history is remembered through memetic diffusion but is made through discursive gameplay: pitting oneself against a community of notoriously hostile, fickle, and contrary trolls to prove one’s value to the community.
4chan’s architecture and memetic culture are thus intertwined due to the perfect forgetfulness of the former and the disseminating power of the latter, particularly important given that 4chan’s rapid pace makes it statistically unlikely that a majority of users witness a given thread at the same time. However, the fact that 4chan does possess institutional memory and history suggests that cybertextual discourse and perusal are meant to combat this, as valuable 4channers use multiple tabs, continually refresh page 0 and all open tabs until they 404, and save everything of interest. Still, users are not expected to share the ontological experience of engaging in 4chan’s discourse, and this engagement is constantly unsettled by the unpredictable implementation of wordfilters, wallpaper and looping background music, and “Post Successful” alterations. Knuttila summarized the 4chan experience as one of “being in” contingency, a condition of epistemic uncertainty that “rebuffs and denies fixed meanings, systems of hierarchy and regiments of pattern.” Continual and anti-systematic, contingency is unpredictable and destabilizing and in a perpetual state of becoming. It is created through moderators’ site modifications and additionally self-generated by 4channers, who respond subversively through ludic memetic incorporation or “gaming the interface” to reclaim 4chan’s interfaces, such as ASCII modifications to usernames, :stopmusic: and similar functions, combo images, textual discourse embedded in images, and so on. The politics of contingency and gamification on 4chan thus organize and reorganize 4channers’ discursive experiences, resulting in and subsuming ludic dynamics like trolling, or disruptive behavior resulting in pleasure at another’s expense. Knuttila determined that the convergence of contingency and alterity radicalizes 4chan’s interface and culture as one of automatic subversion and dissent via flaming, trolling, or mimetic attack. Within this culture, nothing is sacred, everything may be criticized, and anything remotely hierarchical or authoritative will be undermined.
The unstable, inconsistent, and contradictory activities characteristic of this culture of dissent and disruption sustain the experience of contingency within the community and also provide ample opportunity for 4channers to learn to discern between “shit threads” and “epic posts.” Furthermore, these memes and moments serve as models of behavior for 4channers. Slowpoke-Geass and EFG’s inadvertent killing of Pedobear were unexpected and hailed as original and creative in an environment prone to oversaturation. Such community-defining memes are institutionally valuable and chiefly generated during episodes of trolling, especially as they valorize creativity, cleverness, and originality. These incidents are preserved in institutional memory through memetic phrases that mean little or are easily misread by outsiders: for example, “you better love chocolate milk,” or the ubiquitous “OP is a f*g.” Most of these memes encode the obverse of their literal meaning, but it is impossible for an outsider to distinguish between the literal and the contradictory without lurking long enough to absorb this cultural capital. Exposure to institutional memory via lurking permits the translation of chocolate milk to moderators’ fickleness: in a thread about loving chocolate milk, a poster who preferred regular was randomly banned. “OP is a fag” embodies Knuttila’s culture of automatic dissent, particularly towards hierarchical order. By virtue of starting a thread, regardless of the topic, OP is positioning himself as authoritative and is therefore always a subject of ridicule.
The diffusion of these memes occurs chiefly through trolling and is arguably an ontological consequence of anonymity, ephemerality, and contingency. Trolling has been construed by trolls as both discourse and online eugenics, a form of rhetoric and means of moral adjudication. On 4chan, it is chiefly concerned with achieving a sense of intellectual superiority over fellow interactants. Frequent trolling tactics include posting in the guise of an attractive woman describing her sexual exploits, “bait-and-switch” discourse whereby readers’ expectations are thwarted, “coordinated motherfuckery,” or cryptic riddles and wordplay. The potential for creating a “slice of history” meme and the gamified nature of onsite trolling encourages a lusory attitude among 4channers. The goal of these discursive games is, for the troll, to deceive a community of deceivers or, for the audience, to appropriately utilize institutional memory to remain undeceived and prove oneself a valuable user. These authoring and perusing practices sharpen 4channers’ ability to distinguish between worthless content and content that may elevate them to the status of valuable users in future threads requiring repetition or translation of institutional memory.
According to Huizinga, all competition can be likened to gameplay and games are steeped in discursive practice, especially because oral traditions have heavily influenced social order. Discursive games often assume the form of riddles and enigmatic statements that, in ritual contexts, possess “secret power” and place the player’s life at stake. Significantly, these riddles are not solved through logical reasoning but through solutions discoverable only by knowing the game’s rules. Finding the solution—identifying the riddler, answering his question with unexpected cleverness or creativity, or adopting an unexpected approach that bends the rules almost to breaking—renders the other player powerless. This trickster behavior is a corollary of 4chan’s contingency as it unsettles the ontological experience of engaging with the site and making trolling a perfect analogy for the ludological games-as-life philosophy and triumph-defeat binary. On 4chan, the player’s goal is to be the best at riddling, bending the rules, and shattering expectations. The ultimate goal is to be recognized for doing so. Even if creditability is compromised due to anonymity, games allow for self-satisfaction and pride, especially if one’s post is archived and reposted by other users as proof of a historical moment. 4chan “players,” then, create the esoteric and exclusive knowledge that spectators deem cultural capital, and both players and spectators deploy the resultant history to prove their standing as valuable users.
This lusory attitude is described by Suits, who divides gameplay into three stages. The prelusory stage, the goal can be described independently of the game itself. Constitutive rules hinder the most efficient means of achieving the prelusory goal. These stages culminate in a lusory attitude, wherein the player willingly accepts the constitutive rules in order to attain the prelusory goal. The value of a game is predicated on its difficulty level, which may be analogized to levels of cleverness and exclusivity of trolls on 4chan. The “make-believe” discursive games frequently played on 4chan, as in EFG threads or Woody Dark Lord of the Internet, further sustain the site’s institutional memory. Players author a script as they are enacting it, with each “move” intended to evoke a dramatic response from other players. Due to 4chan’s ephemerality, this script is ultimately nonlinear and cybertextual, as new participants link to initial posts, old participants link to replies in other threads or to new threads continuing the role-play, and tangential, “real-world” discussions are embedded within the fantasy narrative. In 4chan role-play, identity deception generates new scenarios and genuine dramatic responses, as users both reply and attempt to figure out whether or not they are being trolled. The cleverer and more convoluted the discourse, the more likely it is to be archived as a “slice of history” demonstrating how best to author, participate in, and read the cybertextual discourse intrinsic to 4chan.
Given 4chan’s architecture, the occurrence of valuable knowledge is unpredictable. The number of users who witness the valuable thread is also unpredictable. Neither can we predict how many of those users will deem the thread a worthy addition to their personal archive; nor how many will be present in future threads when the information is again salient; nor whether or not these users will later spread institutional memory through memetic diffusion. In the end, successful games of trolling and successful resolutions of these games make up a triumph-defeat binary that represents acceptable sociality on 4chan. Institutional memory preserves and valorizes the habitus presented in these threads and imbues their images and text comments with a certain cultural capital, ensuring the emphasis falls on creativity, originality, and contingency. The reward in reading 4chan lies not in locating a single elusive fact but in unhurried browsing, creation and absorption of esoterica discovered along the way, eternal refreshing and collaterating, as valued bits filter up and it becomes increasingly apparent that, as in Cortázar’s proto-cybertext, heaven and earth occupy the same plane, separated only by the field of hopscotch and the way we throw the stones.
Works Cited
Aarseth, E. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bernstein, M. S., Monroy-Hernández, A., Harry, D., André, P., Panovich, K., & Vargas, G. (2011). 4chan and /b/: An analysis of anonymity and ephemerality in a large online community. Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
Blackmore, S. (1999). The meme machine. Oxford University Press.
Cortázar, J. (1987). Hopscotch. Pantheon Books.
Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Beacon Press.
Linde, C. (2009). Working the past: Narrative and institutional memory. Oxford University Press.
Knuttila, L. (2011). User unknown: 4chan, anonymity, and contingency. First Monday, 16(10-3).
Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2009). Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age. Princeton University Press.
Suits, B. (2005). The grasshopper: Games, life, and utopia. Broadview Press, Ltd.
