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The New Man of 4chan

thebaffler.com

31–34 of 34 posts

Re: The New Man of 4chan

#31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a chicken were to go on a murderous rampage (or even orchestrate a campaign that intimidates -- with threats of death, rape and mutilation -- women into withdrawing from online presence) I think such an article might be justified.

Hilarious that you blame 4chan. There's hundreds of millions of pageviews every month. Might as well blame AMERICA for school shooters or Islam for terrorists. Your gut based fear response is uneducated. If you educate yourself your fear will diminish. I promise.

I don't blame 4chan at all, and neither does the author (who, BTW, doesn't talk about "4chan" but about one specific board). Hilarious that you read it this way. But when writing a piece of cultural criticism, it's important to categorize social groups based on cultural narratives (or currents), and the narratives on that 4chan board overlap with those found in the murderers' manifestos and intimidation campaigns. That within every narrative-group some people take things much, much further than others goes without saying. It also goes without saying that discussion groups -- online or off -- are better indicators of the "mainstream" of the groups they represent rather than the most extreme (people who end up behaving violently often eschew gatherings), and most certainly cannot be blamed for violent action. Nevertheless, all sorts of ideological violence are associated with some non-violent ideological groups in some way, and it is disingenuous to claim that there is no cultural association whatsoever between those anti-women rampages and certain online communities.

Re: The New Man of 4chan

#34
post #9

There are two important points I think the author of this article doesn't really understand. 1. "4chan" is not a person, a club, a worldview, or even a reputation-based comment aggregator. 4chan is website with a constant, ephemeral stream of anonymous comments, and the "culture" between different boards varies quite significantly. This system makes it especially prone to misrepresentation by a media that does not un…

So true.

I was on /b/ for easy fun most of the time and went to /r9k/ for a few months, because I liked the idea for original content, but /r9k/ got boring really fast. Didn't know it became a cesspool for MRAs, but in hindsight it was meant to be, the people who made it boring were the guys crying about their problems with girls all the time...

After a long long time I started visiting the other boards. When I first went on /fit/ (after 8 years 4chan, haha) I was baffled. They have their own culture, own memes and everything. It was like a whole own community, which had nothing to do with the rest of 4chan.

But not all boards are "their own". /b/, /rk9/, /k/ and /pol/ for example, have a huge overlap.

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