Musgrave1
Zach Musgrave
12 February 2010
Dr. J. B. Field
4chan and its Discursion
4chan[.org] is an extremely popular English-language imageboard site. Its community is notorious for its tenacity, creativity, and dark underbelly across much of the Internet. Imageboards are a Japanese innovation, and they depart from the traditional message board because they focus heavily on images, rather than on text or other forms of content. They are generally divided into various sub-forums that relate to various cultural niches, such as Japanese animation (anime), auto racing, graphical manipulation, and various music genres, just to name a few.
While many traditional message boards focus on their users’ original thought and discussion and frown upon reuse of material, 4chan does not and in fact does not often generate original content in the traditional sense. More frequently, its users take existing content from mass media sources such as news sites, popular blogs, and other external sources and combine them into something new. This recycling of content is usually done to elicit a humorous reaction, with pop culture touchstones like rapper Kanye West’s upstaging of singer Taylor Swift and 1980’s cartoon characters the Smurfs making frequent appearances. Political and societal commentary is not unheard of; when President Obama was elected the entire site argued over whether the country was saved or damned.
Sometimes 4chan’s users find a cause worthwhile enough that they rise up into a mob of righteous anger and become “Anonymous”, a pseudo-fictional entity who “does not forgive, does not forget, and [is] legion”. The best example of this in real life is Anonymous’ war against the church of Scientology, which 4chan’s user base considers the epitome of both corporate greed and ecclesiastic mind control. Thus began Project Chanology, a concerted effort by Anonymous to draw attention to injustice within Scientology. Because the Scientologists advocate Internet censorship of their organization’s inner rites, Anonymous views them as a threat and thus stages both online attacks and protests in real life.
Everyone with unfettered access to the Internet may access 4chan. Moreover, 4chan’s structure only allows anonymous posting and does not support a traditional username system. This makes it more inclusive than many similar online communities. The barrier to entry of making an account, introducing oneself and being accepted into a normal message board may not seem high, but it is enough to keep out a large proportion of the potential user base. 4chan lowers the barrier to avoid this, which has the added effect of making the system seem like one unified person, the aforementioned Anonymous. The liberated nature of much of 4chan’s content can be attributed to this anonymity, because identity allows for retribution if offense occurs. In this sense, 4chan’s public sphere is freer than many others.
Those who do not have access to the Internet, have a censored connection through a foreign country, or who are averse to strange, scatological, and sometimes pornographic content are effectively excluded from the 4chan community. But this second group is excluded by its sensibilities, which could possibly be modified through a process of desensitization. Its exclusion has nothing to do with a socioeconomic gap, and so 4chan represents in its inclusivity a more Habermasian public sphere than most (if not all) of the historic spheres Habermas himself mentions. A coffee house full of merchants and underwriters represents a barrier to entry poor and lower class people cannot cross. Perhaps it is impossible to create a perfectly inclusive public sphere, but if Habermas says that to create a public opinion, “Access [must be] guaranteed to all citizens” then 4chan comes very close to this ideal.1
Like in real-life clubs and organizations, inclusion in 4chan’s online community is based partly upon a willingness to put in the time to participate and partly upon an affinity with the brand of humor and cultural criticism perpetuated by its members. Users can be banned from the site, but this is based on one’s Internet Protocol (IP) address and not on a username. Therefore many users who violate 4chan’s already lax rules are able to return at a later date by acquiring a new IP and, in a sense, a new identity. This ensures that class, education, and societal norms should not interfere with public discourse. And if we accept that a public sphere is a “sphere of private people [coming] together as a public… that [regulates] from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations…” then 4chan is an incredibly effective public sphere, if only in relation to mainstream content providers, both on and offline.2Fads such as “Lolcats”, “It’s over 9000”, and “Rickrolling”, skewer mainstream sources of kitschy pet photos, ridiculous Japanese children’s programs (DragonBall Z), and bland popular music (Rick Astley) respectively. All these trends are at least
Jurgen Habermas, The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. (New German Critique, 1964), 49
2Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991), 27
purported to have originated on 4chan, and their value as a medium of public discourse is not to be underestimated. For instance, many of the Lolcats have political captions, andduring the recent economic crisis a popular DragonBall parody included a stockbroker shouting at the DOW index, “It’s under 9000!”
Users’ creativity and discourse are allowed to flourish almost without limitation on 4chan. This is especially true for /b/, the “random” section, which is by far its most popular and most vulgar. The only significant rule to interaction on /b/ is to follow United States federal law. Content that breaks the law, interferes with normal operations of the site’s software, or contains personally identifiable information of another person or a threat is prohibited.
Users may reply to their own messages, sometimes creating the illusion of many people when there is only one. Users’ grasp of content is sometimes good and sometimes nonexistent, which deviates from Habermas’ assertion that a certain education must be present to support discourse. 4chan places no rules that would exclude its people’s thoughts, as this would defeat the purpose of a community with no prerequisites for entry.
4chan has a lone administrator, whose identity is uncertain. There is a team of moderators that enforces topicality (in topic-specific areas) and the above-mentioned ban on illegal content. Interestingly enough, 4chan is a self-policing community; moderators are expected to act anonymously and should blend in with the general population even while doing their jobs. So theoretically, one moderator could post content that violates a rule, and another moderator could delete the offending content and even ban the first moderator. This is a sharp departure from Habermas and his strict dichotomy between the bourgeois public sphere and the state - he draws the two as opposed and never intersecting entities. In the 4chan system of governance, the state is a subset of the public sphere and is usually indistinguishable from it. The result is an appearance of mob rule on the outside, even if the effect is more like a loosely controlled traditional message board on the inside.
Habermas says that during the era of “civil society” in France, “public… was synonymous with state-related” which then over time morphed into a public working against the state.1In the 4chan mode of governance, it appears that public is now synonymous with state-related again, if the “state” is the governor of the Web site. However, the early French use of the word does not imply that the public had much influence on the state, whereas 4chan’s public has large input into how the system is run.
To conclude that Habermas’ theories can be applied to or tested on 4chan is possible to an extent, as the site does include a large body of people coming together for a higher and more nuanced purpose than their own individual lives. 4chan’s content, while sometimes illegal and usually vulgar, is definitely a source of discourse. The value of the content can be debated, but clearly the Internet’s many fads come from somewhere. This unique melding of governance, collaboration, and discourse makes 4chan an interesting place to observe Habermas’ ideas in play.
Jurgen Habermas, The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. (New German Critique, 1964), 18
Works Cited
Habermas, Jurgen. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. (New German Critique, 1964). 49.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991). 18, 27.