© Erika M. Sparby
Presentation Materials
Conference on College Composition and Communication 2016
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Erika M. Sparby
Conference on College Composition and Communication
April 8, 2016
“Anonymity, Design, and Identification: The Rhetorical Construction of Identity on Digital Social Media”
When I wrote this proposal, I was looking to answer questions about how collective identities form in anonymous paces. However, as this project evolved, I found myself asking more interesting questions about how and why collective identities function as collectives and how they treat marginalized identities. As such, if I could rename this presentation, I would call it something more like “Design, Ethos, and Identification: The Rhetorical Construction of Memetic Identity on Digital Social Media.” As my presentation will show these three aspects are key to a memetic collective identity performance. This presentation comes from my dissertation, which studies gender and identity in digital social media.
In particular, today I will talk about 4chan, an online imageboard that covers a range of common topics like video games, sports, and music, as well as not-safe-for-work topics like pornography and political incorrectness. 4chan is known as the home of the Random board, or /b/, whose users claim to lack a social conscious. /b/, often characterized as the hivemind of 4chan, is a fast-paced, anything-goes corner of the Internet.
I have been exploring how the collective identity on 4chan, particularly /b/, is governed by the board’s design and ethos and is often subject to memetic behaviors. To highlight both this memetic behavior and explore how one person may defy it through identification and constitutive rhetoric, I will examine an example in which a transwoman self-discloses in a traditionally anti-trans space but manages to rupture the memetic behavior of the collective identity. I also warn you, due to the nature /b/ and its users, there will be some graphic anti-trans and ablest language which I neither support nor condone but will be necessary to illustrate the nature of the collective identity.
/b/’s collective identity is a product of its design and ethos. The design hinges on anonymity and ephemerality. 4chan does not support user registration, and /b/ requires users to post anonymously, so virtually no individual identities are attached to posts. As a result, users refer to each other as “anons.” Threads are also short-lived. Every board contains 10 pages limited to 15 threads each. As anons create new threads or post on existing ones, inactive threads disappear. 4chan does not archive pages. Bernstein et al found that “the median life of a thread [on /b/] is just 3.9 minutes” (4).
On /b/, there are also only two rules: 1) “ZOMG NONE!!!1 [sic],” and 2) 11 of 4chan’s 17 global rules (“Rules”). These global rules largely cover intellectual property protection and personal information security. 4chan uses two kinds of human maintenance to enforce these rules: moderators (mods) and janitors. Mods perform higher-level maintenance, like deleting posts and banning users, while janitors perform lower-level maintenance like submitting ban requests. Mods and janitors are employed on a volunteer basis, and there are only a handful of each available. This means a lot of rule-breaking content slips through the cracks, especially on a busy board like /b/.
4chan’s key design elements—anonymity, ephemerality, simple rules, and low moderation—help develop /b/’s ethos of lawlessness and unaccountability. In “A Rape in Cyberspace,” Julian Dibbell explains that newcomers to his MOO, a kind of chat forum, did not have a set identity and so would transgress social norms and treat the MOO space like “a vast playpen” until they realized that there were rules to be followed. Once they decided to become permanent fixtures, they would mature from virtual children to virtual adults and followed the MOO’s social constraints. 4chan doesn’t have that option. Anons continue to transgress and act hostilely because there is no incentive not to. They have virtually no accountability for their posts.
4chan’s design and ethos lead to its collective identity, or its group of users with a “specific, often strong, sense of themselves as a social unit” (Chakyo 7). This collective identity follows certain patterns of behavior and maintains some level of stability: users act how they are expected to.
An analysis of some of the most frequent kinds of posts reveals a few key collective identity characteristics. First, it is based in misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and ablest behaviors. At any given moment /b/ is usually host to at least one (often more) anti-feminist thread and any number of anti-LGBTQ (particularly anti-trans) threads. In addition, anons deliberately use socially transgressive and pejorative terms liberally and carelessly, engaging in a wordplay that expresses complete disregard for the norms that distinguish them as reprehensible.
Whitney Phillips has also determined the demographic of 4chan users (This Is… 53): 1) posts are written in English and engage with American culture; 2) users need free time, money, and access to technology, which indicates some level of economic privilege; and 3) anons frequently make references to 80s and 90s pop culture, which suggests users are likely members of Generation Y (Phillips 53-4). This assessment is backed by 4chan’s own demographic data. Their “Advertise” page estimates that around 70% of its users are male, 47% are from the United States, and the largest age range is from 18-34 (“Advertise”). Combined with the most common topics that appear on /b/, this data makes it clear that /b/’s collective identity identifies with white, heteronormative, masculine dominant discourses.
Which brings us to /b/’s memetic treatment of transgendered anons. Transpeople are quite possibly the identity that 4chan marginalizes the most savagely and intensely. Anons openly mock the idea that people can identify as another gender or sex than what they were assigned at birth. They are even more outraged that individuals are allowed to choose to transform their bodies to more closely fit their identification.
This sentiment is seen in more lighthearted posts like “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” and “I identify as Bill Gates. I must be given his bank account or I’ll sue.” However, it is also illustrated in violent memetic responses to self-disclosing transwomen. When an anon self-discloses that he or she is something other than white, male, and heteronormative, /b/’s collective identity chooses from a range of memetic responses to punish them and correct their behavior.
When I say “memetic,” I used the word in the pre-Internet Dawkinsian sense. The terms denotes any cultural entity or thought that replicates itself (like genes do) in the minds of others. Examples Dawkins gives of memes include “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (Dawkins 192). This conception of meme also encompasses behaviors. On /b/, the memetic response for self-disclosing transpeople is hostile and violent and refuses them the ability to speak from their individual identity positions.
One thread I followed began with a transwoman discussing why she identifies as trans. She explained, “I am nether [sic] a boy or a girl, yet I am both. I will not allow you to put a label on me.” She explains elsewhere that she considers herself a gender fluid transwoman: some days she identifies as and presents male, but on most she identifies as and presents female. On this day, she explained that she was female, which is why I refer to her as a transwoman.
Her posts were met with a flurry of vitriol. In response to a comment about how she does not let chromosomes dictate her identity, one anon replied, “Actually that’s exactly what it means… unless you’re someone with an xy chromosome and a vagina.. in that case you should probably just kill yourself you mutant freak.” Another responded, “I hope this thing fucking drops dead.” These replies are just a small sample of 4chan’s memetic responses to trans identities and replies to self-disclosing transpeople. The vehemence of these responses reveal that the memetic response to transpeople is characterized by hatred, intolerance, threats of violence, and other prejudiced sentiments.
However, another instance where a self-identifying transwoman engaged in a conversation about what it means to be trans constitutes a rupture in these memetic responses and in the collective identity. Halfway into a thread that was acting hostilely toward transpeople, a self-disclosing, post-op transwoman joined the conversation. As with the first transanon, her self-disclosure broke from the collective identity. Amazingly, although she openly disclosed her trans identity and posted photos to prove it, she garnered little negative attention from the other anons. According to the memetic formula for responding to transanons, the other anons should have ridiculed her in vehemently aggressive terms. But they didn’t. The transanon ruptured the collective identity’s memetic behavior. The anons did not respond in the way they were expected to, showing a disavowal for their identification to the collective identity.
Part of the disparity between responses to the first transwoman and the second involves how each either identified or refused to identify with /b/’s collective identity. The first made no such attempts. Seasoned anons recognized her rhetoric immediately: to them, she looked and sounded like a typical Tumblr SJW, or “social justice warrior.” Her persistent arguing against racism, homophobia, and transphobia, immediately set her apart from /b/’s collective identity. She showed that she operates outside of the discursive barrier and memetic nature the collective identity has constructed. On the other hand, the second transgender woman employed constitutive rhetoric that immediately told other anons that, despite her individual identification as a transwoman, she nonetheless also identifies with /b/’s collective identity. Her first post set herself apart from other transpeople and Tumblr SJWs through maligning famous transwomen American society has recently praised, such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox.
Similarly, the first transwoman displayed ignorance of 4chan’s norms. She repeatedly posted images of her face, although she is looking away from the camera. However, the second transanon posted photos that follow 4chan’s unspoken guidelines for composition: she only included the necessary details and kept her face out of frame and her identity anonymous.
Finally, although she was defending what an anon would consider to be a classic SJW stance, the second transanon did so according to 4chan’s terms. One anon told her, “If you have a Y chromosomes [sic], you are a male. You are one dumb mother fucker if you think otherwise.” She replied by explaining, “I didn’t say I was a real girl though. I said I live my life as one. Are you that autistic to not understand the difference?”
She did two important things here to show identification with the collective identity. First, she negated her individual identity by saying that she only “live[s her] life as [a female].” In earlier posts she explained that she has undergone full transition surgery and in later posts she said she takes hormones to increase her estrogen. She clearly does more to maintain her individual identity than her casual dismissal lets on, but she disavows it.
Second, she employed one of 4chan’s favorite pejorative terms: “autistic.” This term is often used as a more offensive version of the already offensive term “retarded,” which /b/ employs to insult anons who do not follow the collective identity’s norms. When the transgender woman uses the term to dismiss the remarks about chromosomes, she simultaneously firmly affixes herself within the collective identity while setting the other anon outside of it. This is constitutive rhetoric: she uses the language of the collective identity to rupture it.
At the same time, the transanon’s display of rhetorical power reveals a rupture in the collective identity. The first trans example aligns with the collective identity’s sentiment toward transpeople: hatred and intentional misunderstanding and mislabeling. However, after the second transwoman uses constitutive rhetoric to self-disclose and assert power, she opens the possibility for rational discourse about transpeople.
First, another trans person self-discloses and agrees that he or she also “hate[s] Bruce Jenner.” Then the second transanon takes questions about her transition. Another anon even expresses that he or she thinks their friend is in “trans-denial” and asks for advice on how to broach the subject. This type of civil discourse about transpeople and trans identity is practically unheard-of in this corner of 4chan.
What this example reveals more generally about /b/’s collective identity is that although it acts like and purports to be a monolithic entity of white, heteronormative masculinity, it’s not. Instead, the individuals are diverse performing monolithic. We tend to vilify spaces like this and assume that the users who visit them are awful bigots, but this example shows that 4chan’s memetic behavior is a performance, not necessarily a reflection of reality. When the collective was confronted with an instance where a trans member self-disclosed while also asserting her right to belong, it broke down.
Most importantly, to effectively rupture a collective identity centered on negative cultural assumptions, an individual must perform constitutive rhetoric to establish identification with it. All users regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, and so on engage in a kind of performance by denying key characteristics of their individual identities to don the identity markers of /b/’s collective. The collective identity is an influential, but ultimately fragile performance. This means that the transgressive memetic behavior in digital communities both in and beyond 4chan can be counter-memed—or fought against—through identification and constitutive rhetoric.
Works Cited
“Advertise.” 4chan. 2015. Web. 6 Dec 2015.
Bernstein, Michael S. Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, and Greg Vargas. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (2011). Web. 6 Dec 2015.
Chakyo, Mary. Portable Communities: The Social Dynamics of Online and Mobile Connectedness. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008. Print.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene [1976]. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Phillips, Whitney. This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2015. Print.
“Rules.” 4chan. 2015. Web. 7 Dec 2015.
Erika M. Sparby
Conference on College Composition and Communication
April 8, 2016
“Anonymity, Design, and Identification: The Rhetorical Construction of Identity on Digital Social Media”
When I wrote this proposal, I was looking to answer questions about how collective identities form in anonymous paces. However, as this project evolved, I found myself asking more interesting questions about how and why collective identities function as collectives and how they treat marginalized identities. As such, if I could rename this presentation, I would call it something more like “Design, Ethos, and Identification: The Rhetorical Construction of Memetic Identity on Digital Social Media.” As my presentation will show these three aspects are key to a memetic collective identity performance. This presentation comes from my dissertation, which studies gender and identity in digital social media.
In particular, today I will talk about 4chan, an online imageboard that covers a range of common topics like video games, sports, and music, as well as not-safe-for-work topics like pornography and political incorrectness. 4chan is known as the home of the Random board, or /b/, whose users claim to lack a social conscious. /b/, often characterized as the hivemind of 4chan, is a fast-paced, anything-goes corner of the Internet.
I have been exploring how the collective identity on 4chan, particularly /b/, is governed by the board’s design and ethos and is often subject to memetic behaviors. To highlight both this memetic behavior and explore how one person may defy it through identification and constitutive rhetoric, I will examine an example in which a transwoman self-discloses in a traditionally anti-trans space but manages to rupture the memetic behavior of the collective identity. I also warn you, due to the nature /b/ and its users, there will be some graphic anti-trans and ablest language which I neither support nor condone but will be necessary to illustrate the nature of the collective identity.
/b/’s collective identity is a product of its design and ethos. The design hinges on anonymity and ephemerality. 4chan does not support user registration, and /b/ requires users to post anonymously, so virtually no individual identities are attached to posts. As a result, users refer to each other as “anons.” Threads are also short-lived. Every board contains 10 pages limited to 15 threads each. As anons create new threads or post on existing ones, inactive threads disappear. 4chan does not archive pages. Bernstein et al found that “the median life of a thread [on /b/] is just 3.9 minutes” (4).
On /b/, there are also only two rules: 1) “ZOMG NONE!!!1 [sic],” and 2) 11 of 4chan’s 17 global rules (“Rules”). These global rules largely cover intellectual property protection and personal information security. 4chan uses two kinds of human maintenance to enforce these rules: moderators (mods) and janitors. Mods perform higher-level maintenance, like deleting posts and banning users, while janitors perform lower-level maintenance like submitting ban requests. Mods and janitors are employed on a volunteer basis, and there are only a handful of each available. This means a lot of rule-breaking content slips through the cracks, especially on a busy board like /b/.
4chan’s key design elements—anonymity, ephemerality, simple rules, and low moderation—help develop /b/’s ethos of lawlessness and unaccountability. In “A Rape in Cyberspace,” Julian Dibbell explains that newcomers to his MOO, a kind of chat forum, did not have a set identity and so would transgress social norms and treat the MOO space like “a vast playpen” until they realized that there were rules to be followed. Once they decided to become permanent fixtures, they would mature from virtual children to virtual adults and followed the MOO’s social constraints. 4chan doesn’t have that option. Anons continue to transgress and act hostilely because there is no incentive not to. They have virtually no accountability for their posts.
4chan’s design and ethos lead to its collective identity, or its group of users with a “specific, often strong, sense of themselves as a social unit” (Chakyo 7). This collective identity follows certain patterns of behavior and maintains some level of stability: users act how they are expected to.
An analysis of some of the most frequent kinds of posts reveals a few key collective identity characteristics. First, it is based in misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and ablest behaviors. At any given moment /b/ is usually host to at least one (often more) anti-feminist thread and any number of anti-LGBTQ (particularly anti-trans) threads. In addition, anons deliberately use socially transgressive and pejorative terms liberally and carelessly, engaging in a wordplay that expresses complete disregard for the norms that distinguish them as reprehensible.
Whitney Phillips has also determined the demographic of 4chan users (This Is… 53): 1) posts are written in English and engage with American culture; 2) users need free time, money, and access to technology, which indicates some level of economic privilege; and 3) anons frequently make references to 80s and 90s pop culture, which suggests users are likely members of Generation Y (Phillips 53-4). This assessment is backed by 4chan’s own demographic data. Their “Advertise” page estimates that around 70% of its users are male, 47% are from the United States, and the largest age range is from 18-34 (“Advertise”). Combined with the most common topics that appear on /b/, this data makes it clear that /b/’s collective identity identifies with white, heteronormative, masculine dominant discourses.
Which brings us to /b/’s memetic treatment of transgendered anons. Transpeople are quite possibly the identity that 4chan marginalizes the most savagely and intensely. Anons openly mock the idea that people can identify as another gender or sex than what they were assigned at birth. They are even more outraged that individuals are allowed to choose to transform their bodies to more closely fit their identification.
This sentiment is seen in more lighthearted posts like “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” and “I identify as Bill Gates. I must be given his bank account or I’ll sue.” However, it is also illustrated in violent memetic responses to self-disclosing transwomen. When an anon self-discloses that he or she is something other than white, male, and heteronormative, /b/’s collective identity chooses from a range of memetic responses to punish them and correct their behavior.
When I say “memetic,” I used the word in the pre-Internet Dawkinsian sense. The terms denotes any cultural entity or thought that replicates itself (like genes do) in the minds of others. Examples Dawkins gives of memes include “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (Dawkins 192). This conception of meme also encompasses behaviors. On /b/, the memetic response for self-disclosing transpeople is hostile and violent and refuses them the ability to speak from their individual identity positions.
One thread I followed began with a transwoman discussing why she identifies as trans. She explained, “I am nether [sic] a boy or a girl, yet I am both. I will not allow you to put a label on me.” She explains elsewhere that she considers herself a gender fluid transwoman: some days she identifies as and presents male, but on most she identifies as and presents female. On this day, she explained that she was female, which is why I refer to her as a transwoman.
Her posts were met with a flurry of vitriol. In response to a comment about how she does not let chromosomes dictate her identity, one anon replied, “Actually that’s exactly what it means… unless you’re someone with an xy chromosome and a vagina.. in that case you should probably just kill yourself you mutant freak.” Another responded, “I hope this thing fucking drops dead.” These replies are just a small sample of 4chan’s memetic responses to trans identities and replies to self-disclosing transpeople. The vehemence of these responses reveal that the memetic response to transpeople is characterized by hatred, intolerance, threats of violence, and other prejudiced sentiments.
However, another instance where a self-identifying transwoman engaged in a conversation about what it means to be trans constitutes a rupture in these memetic responses and in the collective identity. Halfway into a thread that was acting hostilely toward transpeople, a self-disclosing, post-op transwoman joined the conversation. As with the first transanon, her self-disclosure broke from the collective identity. Amazingly, although she openly disclosed her trans identity and posted photos to prove it, she garnered little negative attention from the other anons. According to the memetic formula for responding to transanons, the other anons should have ridiculed her in vehemently aggressive terms. But they didn’t. The transanon ruptured the collective identity’s memetic behavior. The anons did not respond in the way they were expected to, showing a disavowal for their identification to the collective identity.
Part of the disparity between responses to the first transwoman and the second involves how each either identified or refused to identify with /b/’s collective identity. The first made no such attempts. Seasoned anons recognized her rhetoric immediately: to them, she looked and sounded like a typical Tumblr SJW, or “social justice warrior.” Her persistent arguing against racism, homophobia, and transphobia, immediately set her apart from /b/’s collective identity. She showed that she operates outside of the discursive barrier and memetic nature the collective identity has constructed. On the other hand, the second transgender woman employed constitutive rhetoric that immediately told other anons that, despite her individual identification as a transwoman, she nonetheless also identifies with /b/’s collective identity. Her first post set herself apart from other transpeople and Tumblr SJWs through maligning famous transwomen American society has recently praised, such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox.
Similarly, the first transwoman displayed ignorance of 4chan’s norms. She repeatedly posted images of her face, although she is looking away from the camera. However, the second transanon posted photos that follow 4chan’s unspoken guidelines for composition: she only included the necessary details and kept her face out of frame and her identity anonymous.
Finally, although she was defending what an anon would consider to be a classic SJW stance, the second transanon did so according to 4chan’s terms. One anon told her, “If you have a Y chromosomes [sic], you are a male. You are one dumb mother fucker if you think otherwise.” She replied by explaining, “I didn’t say I was a real girl though. I said I live my life as one. Are you that autistic to not understand the difference?”
She did two important things here to show identification with the collective identity. First, she negated her individual identity by saying that she only “live[s her] life as [a female].” In earlier posts she explained that she has undergone full transition surgery and in later posts she said she takes hormones to increase her estrogen. She clearly does more to maintain her individual identity than her casual dismissal lets on, but she disavows it.
Second, she employed one of 4chan’s favorite pejorative terms: “autistic.” This term is often used as a more offensive version of the already offensive term “retarded,” which /b/ employs to insult anons who do not follow the collective identity’s norms. When the transgender woman uses the term to dismiss the remarks about chromosomes, she simultaneously firmly affixes herself within the collective identity while setting the other anon outside of it. This is constitutive rhetoric: she uses the language of the collective identity to rupture it.
At the same time, the transanon’s display of rhetorical power reveals a rupture in the collective identity. The first trans example aligns with the collective identity’s sentiment toward transpeople: hatred and intentional misunderstanding and mislabeling. However, after the second transwoman uses constitutive rhetoric to self-disclose and assert power, she opens the possibility for rational discourse about transpeople.
First, another trans person self-discloses and agrees that he or she also “hate[s] Bruce Jenner.” Then the second transanon takes questions about her transition. Another anon even expresses that he or she thinks their friend is in “trans-denial” and asks for advice on how to broach the subject. This type of civil discourse about transpeople and trans identity is practically unheard-of in this corner of 4chan.
What this example reveals more generally about /b/’s collective identity is that although it acts like and purports to be a monolithic entity of white, heteronormative masculinity, it’s not. Instead, the individuals are diverse performing monolithic. We tend to vilify spaces like this and assume that the users who visit them are awful bigots, but this example shows that 4chan’s memetic behavior is a performance, not necessarily a reflection of reality. When the collective was confronted with an instance where a trans member self-disclosed while also asserting her right to belong, it broke down.
Most importantly, to effectively rupture a collective identity centered on negative cultural assumptions, an individual must perform constitutive rhetoric to establish identification with it. All users regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, and so on engage in a kind of performance by denying key characteristics of their individual identities to don the identity markers of /b/’s collective. The collective identity is an influential, but ultimately fragile performance. This means that the transgressive memetic behavior in digital communities both in and beyond 4chan can be counter-memed—or fought against—through identification and constitutive rhetoric.
Works Cited
“Advertise.” 4chan. 2015. Web. 6 Dec 2015.
Bernstein, Michael S. Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, and Greg Vargas. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (2011). Web. 6 Dec 2015.
Chakyo, Mary. Portable Communities: The Social Dynamics of Online and Mobile Connectedness. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008. Print.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene [1976]. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Phillips, Whitney. This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2015. Print.
“Rules.” 4chan. 2015. Web. 7 Dec 2015.