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Lurk Moar: Conducting Research in Transgressive Internet Environments
Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information
Computers & Writing, Frostburg State University, Frostburg, MD
June 8, 2013
[0, 1] In September 2011, longtime blogger Cole Stryker published Epic Win for Anonymous, the first book discussing the transgressive imageboard 4chan, having intermittently posted on 4chan’s Random – /b/ board during his writing process. Epic Win offered a historical and ethnographic study intended to make a peripheral, exclusive, but highly influential website accessible to the mainstream public. As expected of a subculture allegedly opposed to exposure and representation by identifiable individuals, 4channers swiftly initiated trolling procedures. [2] Pizzas were ordered to the book release party; Stryker’s contact information was disseminated online; bedbugs were reported at his apartment; and gay transvestite prostitutes were invited to his home. [3] Near simultaneously, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman published scholarship on the activist collective Anonymous, including asides about its birthplace, 4chan. However, 4channers casually dismissed her, instead targeting users who proposed targeting her. [4] Finally, sociologists Patrick Underwood and Howard Welser also published a paper in 2011 on 4chan, Anonymous, and digital media protest forms. [5] The piece was critiqued by the community but the usual antagonism was mysteriously absent. Instead, [6] 4channers applauded the authors as longtime lurkers and “smartfags” and, when Welser himself posted a comment, he was welcomed and defended from the trolls.
This awareness and selectivity on the part of 4channers regarding ethnographic representations of their subculture problematizes the methodology used in researching 4chan, a quandary that is compounded by 4chan’s structural and cultural elements. 4channers seem sharply attuned to representational bias that attempts to align 4chan’s anti-normative habitus with offline social values, minimizing or ignoring the social function of its purposeful transgression, tricksterism, and spectacle. As 4chan remains influential in Internet culture, cyberethnographic methods should be reevaluated for increased efficacy in transgressive online spaces.
[7] In this presentation, I will first provide background on 4chan and cyberethnography to illustrate the ways in which conventional research methods—namely, identity disclosure, identifiability, and participant observation—falter in transgressive spaces. I will then analyze the methods of Stryker, Coleman, and Underwood and Welser to show that lurking is preferable and perhaps even necessary in transgressive media environments like 4chan, as such communities must be understood on their own terms to obtain valid, unbiased, reproducible, and authentic data.
[8] Registered in 2003, the imageboard 4chan is in some ways the crux of English and Japanese transgressive online cultures. Like those cultures, it is seemingly capricious, antagonistic, and impenetrable to outsiders, a fact compounded by its decentralized, nonhierarchical, and completely anonymous nature. It is publicly accessible and lacks even the option of registration and, according to Bernstein et al, the default username “Anonymous” is adopted by over 90% of 4channers without the provision of other identifying information. Those who disclose identity factors of any kind are denigrated as culturally incompetent. Content automatically refreshes and does so especially rapidly on Random – /b/, which receives approximately 30% of 4chan’s total traffic. Expired content is completely removed from 4chan’s servers, such that institutional memory must be sustained through the rare act of collective rememoration. Thus, 4chan is penetrable only by lurking and extensive perusal of sanitized texts like Know Your Meme, which, given the rapid turnover of /b/’s content, are incomplete repositories at best. Requesting explanations only invites derision. [9] In short, accurate information about 4chan’s distinct social and material practices is obtainable only through lurking, intimating difficulties for researchers aiming to use hybrid qualitative methodologies.
[10] Lacking rules and recorded history, the anti-normative prescriptive atmosphere of 4chan coincides with Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus: the synthesized locus of norms and regularities in behavioral dynamics that serve as principles of practice in societies lacking formal codification. As an internalized, embodied history, habitus “ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.” 4chan’s habitus is heavily informed by its brand of anonymous culture or “A-culture,” what Auerbach describes as constant duplicity [11], irony, intellectual rivalry and one-upmanship, investigative activity, and the tricksteresque transgression of offline social norms [12]. A-culture can be organized into three primary economies: suspicion, offense, and unreality. Respectively, these economies refer to the unverifiable nature of anonymous discourse; the use of outrage affect as a barrier to entry; and the mandatory absenting of collateral indicators of embodied reality. These economies converge such that speech deemed amoral, depraved, malicious, and unconscionable by offline normative standards [13] become social practices and behavioral standards on /b/.
4chan’s A-culture radically diverges from the reputational economies of sites like Facebook, pseudonymous discussion forums, and learning communities where most cyberethnography is conducted. Contemporary cyberethnography, exemplified by Markham, Miller, Hine, Boellstorf, and others, is typically rooted in pseudonymous, often close-knit virtual environments whose prescriptive atmospheres accord with offline social tendencies. The fundamental question asked by Hine, “How can you live in an online setting?,” has thus tacitly become “How can you live in those online settings most closely resembling reality?” [14] Miller, for instance, links online practices to offline personhood and social, political, and economic factors, reinforcing the notion that cyberethnography should consider online spaces as reflective of offline reality. In one of the earliest ethnographies of life online, Markham analyzed chat rooms using synchronous interviews, face-to-face interactions, and lurking. Significantly, both of these sites of study were reputational environments using strong identity and traditional prestige measures, where participants were identifiable, trust relationships could be constructed, questions were tolerated by the community as a whole, and linkages between online and offline personae were acceptable. Boellstorf, a self-identified “virtual anthropologist,” examined the pseudonymous environment Second Life by separating these personae, conducting all of his fieldwork in the virtual world and making no attempt to discover his respondents’ offline identities. His profile identified him as an anthropologist, and he performed participant observation, using interviews and focus groups to sketch out the world’s cultural logic. Again, however, the efficacy of this approach presumes participants’ cooperativeness, authenticity of responses, and receptiveness to the disclosure of one’s status as a researcher. In addition, Robinson and Schulz and other scholars cite ethical issues within cyberethnography, including identity disclosure, informed consent, differentiation of public and private space, protection of respondents’ identities, and validity of responses, which are in part produced by the researcher’s prompting, however open-ended the questions.
The subversive, antagonistic ethos of /b/, which is especially hostile toward newcomers and celebrity-seekers, frustrates these cyberethnographic practices. [15] Anonymity, which often includes fixed pseudonymity in most cyberethnographies, is redefined on 4chan, as participants are unidentifiable. Due to the pressures of A-culture, 4channers resist identification and linkage to offline identity. Trust relationships are rendered impossible by this and by A-culture’s economy of suspicion. Respondents and researchers who disclose identity factors risk investigation and trolling. Moreover, even if disclosure was permissible, announcing oneself as a researcher would quickly vanish due to 4chan’s ephemerality. This also necessitates constant, consistent presence, as a thread that vanishes in minutes may be absorbed into cultural practice and will not be recorded in extratextual repositories or explained to those who missed its origin. As such, and unlike most communities where cyberethnography transpires, lurking is mandatory on 4chan; failure to do so may result in ostracism.
The efficacy of lurking as a research method is illustrated by work produced by Stryker, Coleman, and Underwood and Welser as well as 4channers’ responses to each. In his book, Stryker set up his epistemic privilege and credibility through his self-proclaimed position as a participant observer since 2007. Epic Win details the history and rise of 4chan and its impact on mainstream popular culture on- and off-line. While drafting the book, he posted about it on /b/ to gauge 4channers’ reactions, which ranged from apathetic to hostile, likely due to his flawed research methods and cultural descriptions. [16] Stryker evaluates 4chan according to normative standards, separating the “life-ruiners” from the politically inclined, a statement that is neither true nor generalizable, and asking founders and designers to speak for the community. He also loses credibility with the community by positioning himself as a veteran user but demonstrating a lack of insider knowledge, as he misinterprets /b/’s anti-normative ethos. For instance, he states that, “4chan’s relationship with women is weird and sad. Some use the word cumdumpster as a synonym for female. Girls even refer to themselves this way. When women appear on 4chan, the men bombard them with commands to disrobe and perform sex.” Here, he displays ignorance of not only the wordfilter origins of “cumdumpster” but also the ironic uses of bigoted rhetoric onsite, which is not exclusive to female users and is intended to reduce the number of individuals who deviate from A-culture’s total anonymity. In planning to raid Stryker, 4channers expressed exasperation with his methods, observing that “he seems wholly hostile to 4chan as a whole” and is “blatantly insulting” of the subculture he purports to understand.
[17] Unlike Stryker, Coleman makes no effort to speak for Anonymous or 4chan or identify participants, even when inviting members to pseudonymously guest lecture in her class. Her previous work focused on hacker culture, but her present research directly treats 4chan and indirectly dissects its dynamics as a collective with a trickster ethos. Despite being relatively new to the culture, she demonstrates a vested interest in providing authentic cultural descriptions of routine experience, social practice, and behavioral dynamics. As such, she is able to recognize the importance of pleasure in onsite tricksterism and notes that the phenomenon of trolling and lulz—or the pleasures of emotional disruption—has yet to be fully unpacked. Furthermore, her refusal to disclose her identity on 4chan despite identifiably participating on Anonymous’ IRC channels indicates an understanding of and respect for the different sites and registers of A-culture. [18] Her scholarship explicitly accepts the community on its own terms, rejecting mainstream media’s negativist representations and normative moral bias and contextualizing its actions in the cultural milieu from which it arose. As such, when “newfag” 4channers occasionally post threats in the comments section of her articles and interviews, they are flamed for not recognizing that she “gets it.” [19] Similarly, Underwood and Welser extensively examine 4chan’s habitus, structural and cultural features, humor, memes, group identity, and establishment of communal boundaries. In addition to providing specific examples taken from 4chan, they also demonstrate an understanding of obscure insider references, slang, and communal goals. Most of these issues have been overlooked or misunderstood by mainstream media; correspondingly, 4channers reacted to the accuracy of this article with astonishment. Although details were singled out for critique, the article was debated rather than vilified. [20] The authors were lauded for having lurked so efficiently they might have witnessed participants masturbating; the article was dubbed “itsbeautiful.jpg,” “Grade A prime academia stuff”; and the authors were applauded for “getting it” better than some Chanology participants do by virtue of having lurked extensively before producing written remarks.
[21] In the tradition of transgressive subcultures that become the focus of media moral panics and cooptation, 4channers simply desire accurate representation and the embracement of lurking as essential to producing authentic, credible accounts. Cyberethnographers must be sensitive to how participants perceive these accounts, linkages between online and offline personae, and the value system against which they are measured. As Markham, Hine, Boellstorf, and others note, the point is not to avoid prescription against anti-normative behaviors but to keep prescription and description distinct. Researching /b/ necessitates a lack of prescription and complete, long-term embedment to properly dissect the cultural logics of the space. Lurking preserves the phenomenon without skewing behavioral dynamics and thus remains faithful to the subjective experiences of participants. According to Markham, “the methodological dilemma is to be sensitive to the context, to figure out what the most suitable interpretive path is, and to remain epistemologically consistent.” Long-term lurking would ease this dilemma in a cyberethnography of /b/ while preserving both the authenticity and credibility of the account and the safety of the researcher and participants being observed. [22]
