New Media Research Studio

The group known as ‘Anonymous’ have been in the news quite a bit lately.  One teen involved in the group was just arrested for allegedly hacking the website of Anonymous’ enemy, the Church of Scientology.  He faces a possible ten years in prison if convicted.

Anonymous, for those unfamiliar, is tied to the messageboard “4chan” and the subset forum “/b/”.   /b/, essentially, is a random image forum, where users have no login, and all are anonymous.  Gawker sums up /b/ better than I can:

A subset of 4chan, technically a “random image board,” where completely anonymous — no login, no username — people try to shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other. Encyclopedia Dramatica calls it the asshole of the Internet. It’s where LOLcats started as the edgier, funnier Caturdays, in which photos of cats (particularly on Saturday) were posted and captioned with forumspeak, which degenerated into the LOLspeak you now think is so clever. Customs on /b/ include posts promising photos of personal degradation in return for certain kinds of porn or other helpful information; sarcastically asking for advice on teen romance; sarcastically asking/telling anything; pretending to have insider info or be privy to breaking news; posting image puzzles; and raiding other people’s sites.

The description of /b/ as the ‘asshole of the Internet’ is particularly interesting, and certainly accurate.  /b/ is intensely racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, so much so that if I were to ever quote from the board I would feel compelled to do so under a cut.  Some characterize this speech as ‘irony,’ but it really does not seem to be ironic after a certain point.  One function of communication, if I recall correctly, is to reinforce social norms, and it is disturbing to witness what could be considered the normalizing of hate speech.  It makes me curious as to whether the anonymity and group culture of /b/ cultivates these attitudes, or whether the users are, for lack of a better word, assholes, to begin with.
Despite /b/’s culture of entitlement, hostility, and orgiastic idiocy, I cannot help but agree with their methodology for their ‘targets,’ including the Church of Scientology and Sarah Palin–it was a “/b/tard,” as they are called, who hacked into her Yahoo! e-mail account.  The CoS has a policy of attempting to silence criticisms of Scientology, most notably with South Park’s scientology episode, so anonymity is essential to those who protest its allegedly unethical practices.  I am curious about the effects of anonymity on /b/–do people reveal their ‘true selves’ when anonymous?  It protects people from those they are criticizing, but it also protects people from those they are criticizing.

Incidentally, something I noticed in my research on /b/ was the meme of text “no girls on the internet,” or variants thereof.  Whenever a poster announced femaleness, such as a post that started out “I’m a girl and I prefer black guys because white guys…”, drew responses that doubted whether the poster was in fact female.

Female impersonation on the Internet has a long history.  Frequently men pose as women for sexual reasons, such as the example drawn by Nakamura of the “GorgeousHotBabe.”  It is incredibly unlikely that anyone with the username “GorgeousHotBabe” is female–what real woman would choose such a screenname?  However, sexual reasons are not the only reasons to pose as female; it can give a blog a lot of attention it may not have had otherwise, such as the case of “LibertarianGirl”, who was actually a old dude pretending to be a college girl to draw hits to his blog.  I’m curious about the implications of this sort of behavior.

What do you guys think?  Have you ever used /b/?  What are your experiences?