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.
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.