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Because None of Us Are as Cruel as All of Us – Boxxy

Alex B said:
It's the logical extension of the belief that it's ok to call someone a cunt on a thread, when you would never dream of saying it to their face in an equivalent real-life situation.
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TheDave said:
Geek rage knows no bounds.
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DotCommunist said:
I'm finding this whole discussion a bit lol because the answer is 'a crowd is as intelligent as it's least intelligent member'

substitute crowd for anonymous internet crowd and intelligent for ethical and there is your answer.

The ugliest shit rears it head on 4chan. And sometimes the great stuff like the scio protests, or really funny cat pictures.
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Right, now here's, IMO, the interesting bit: the reaction of 4chan. It's less clear cut than the others and even more rambling so, well, good luck if you decide to read it.

Firstly, it's important to identify what we talk about when we talk about 4chan.

As far as I understand it, though I'm no expert, 4chan is almost the loosest possible congregation of individuals that you could establish on the internet.

It's boundaries are so diffuse and its barriers to entry so low that it's nigh on impossible to say where it ends and where it begins when identifying 'members'.

The only way to identify 4chan is to point towards the boards themselves. The pictures and comments that are already up there.

But such a delineation is almost meaningless in attempting a ham-fisted pop-psych analysis such as I'm trying to conduct here.

We're not really interested in the information that is posted up on the board, we're really interested in the people who post up the information, why they do it, why they think it's acceptable, why they wouldn't do it anywhere else.

The point I'm trying to get at is pretty obvious.

4chan is the perfect exemplification of the online disinhibition effect. It's pure anonymity (at least in the immediate access, if not in the true trail of the internet account) lifts all social restrictions from its 'members', if one can even talk about people being a 'member' of a community whose strength lies in the invisibility of its 'members'.

There's a really good NYT article on trolling here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/m...pagewanted=1&_r=3&sq=troll 4chan&st=cse&scp=1

where they describe the effect of 4chan as a reverse panopticon here:

NYT said:
/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”
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Broadly speaking this is the effect of the internet generally in social interactions. With no fixed centre, or hierarchy, or means of establishing an individual's provenance, the centre is whatever we happen to be focusing on at any given point in time.

In this way it can provide a disorientating total collapse of the social horizon.

Moreover as we scrabble about in this cascade of information, not knowing how to judge it, where it comes from, it's location or relationship to the overall picture of society, our ability to judge our own position in society falls away too.

The remoteness of sitting behind the computer screen, feeling an almost invulnerable sense of anonymity makes us bolder and, for some, far more aggressive than we would be in real life. The two feed on each other, the disorientation and aggressiveness inflating egos and making people more liable to attack, more liable to take offence.

Because social boundaries have been removed, we feel a sense of proprietary ownership over the whole of our internet experience. We gain so much value and identity from what we discover online, if we do mediate much of our experience through the online world, that we feel that our regular places are strictly ours, despite the patent absurdity of that position.

It's a similar tendency to kids or toddlers refusing to let others play with their toys, except here we make the fundamental mistake that there is only one toy and it is no-one's to control, least of all our own.

These two tendencies, the collapse of the social horizon and the creation of a sense of direct ownership, inform why people react so stridently online. People say things they wouldn't normally say, exercising emotional responses that wouldn't normally be triggered, permitting reactions and escalations that would never be countenanced in real life.

Finally, to those who dismiss 4chan and say they're just a bunch of geeks. Admittedly we have now way of knowing the demographics behind the boards, but I think it's absurd to wave them all away offhand. I'm sure virtually everyone on this site has laughed at 4chan content.

Hell, the on ur boardz thread is one of the most popular in urban history.

I refuse to believe that 4chan's 'members' are congenital idiots and uniquely amoral individuals who never retreat from their screens into the light of day.
That path just seems a typical cop-out. Thar be monsters...

I suspect that there is no common factor that links 4chan members to any others apart from the fact that they go on 4chan.

Recently there was a thread on here which asked whether posters' personalities or identities were any different online to off.

IIRC, by and large people found it difficult to say, but most seemed to be in the consensus that they were the same person in both societies.

This seems absurd to me. We all have multiple identities that we switch between during any given day: to our friends, to our family, to our colleagues.

Your identity and your personality is, within broad boundaries, variable, not fixed.

When people visit 4chan, I would argue, that a small part of their identity becomes sublimated into the ethos and culture of 4chan.

I very much doubt that 4chan acts in a seductive way, attracting the wrong'uns to their natural hideout from all around the globe.

On the contrary I would argue that it acts in an influential way on each individual whenever they visit it, informing and claiming part of that person's identity and value system for however long they visit it. I guess what I'm saying is that the potential for /b/ is in all of us.

So pulling both strands together.

There are no /b/tards. We are all /b/tards. We are so because of the direct effect the internet has on our social value systems. That is something worth thinking about it.
 
There are no /b/tards. We are all /b/tards. We are so because of the direct effect the internet has on our social value systems. That is something worth thinking about it.
Click to expand...

The internet hasn't created any new forms of individual or group behaviour in people, it's merely highlighted and in some cases amplified the effects - not surprising really - this is what Sun used to call 'The Network Effect' applied to ideas and personal abuse.
 
kyser_soze said:
The internet hasn't created any new forms of individual or group behaviour in people, it's merely highlighted and in some cases amplified the effects - not surprising really - this is what Sun used to call 'The Network Effect' applied to ideas and personal abuse.
Click to expand...

I don't know about that. Take a look at that NYT article when you've got time.

The real trolling subculture, something that we have thankfully never really seen on this board, looks very much like new behaviour to me.

Or at least behaviour that has been amplified to such a high pitch by the internet that it might as well be new.
 
I think it's important to remember that there is a vast chasm between the majority of people, who may laugh at inappropriate material or post an offensive comment, and the minority who dedicate time to tracking down people in real life and/or hacking their accounts. These two elements both come from the same 'group', but clearly some members of the group have crossed a line that the others merely flirt with.
 
Somebody mentioned the encyclopedia dramatica article, but it is worth a copy pasta

I like Boxxy, and here's why. I'm not postpubescent (over 25), I have a girlfriend, and I don't fantasize about her. I like her because she is the antidote, the antithesis, the hemlock in the cup to Internet Tough Guyism.

I was surprised to see that, for all its posturing, /b/ really does hold one thing sacred: it's 'bad muthafucka' image of itself. /b/ really believes that it's frightening, that it's tougher than a Ford Chevy, that it's badass masculinity personified, in a sense. And, before, there were very few ways to disrupt this image, to give it a good hard kick in the shins.

And then Boxxy came along. Boxxy love is everything /b/ hates - passive, gentle, adorable, sweet. It gives without asking, it loves without asking in return. Instead of being aggressively faux-adult, it's happily faux-childlike. That's why Boxxy became a meme - because she DIDN'T want the attention; because she provided no pics (as the /b/tards will attest). As a result, Boxxy turned into the most successful way to troll the /b/tards ever devised. It actually makes the gore and violence and sexism and racism fantards squeal, because it hits them where it hurts - in their image of themselves. How can they be tough, scary guys when their favorite hangout is one long love poem to Boxxy love? So that's why I love Boxxy - the sound of /b/'s humiliation is sweet music to my ears.
Click to expand...

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Boxxy
 
I've seen a message board go all out to find someone and attempt to destroy their life for great justice and spend years persuing this aim. It doesn't just happen on 4chan.
 
Diamond said:
I don't know about that. Take a look at that NYT article when you've got time.

The real trolling subculture, something that we have thankfully never really seen on this board, looks very much like new behaviour to me.

Or at least behaviour that has been amplified to such a high pitch by the internet that it might as well be new.
Click to expand...

Think about what trolling actually is as a behvaioural form, rather than the medium it manifests itself in. Think about the person who routinely complains about everything, or the friend who endlessly picks fights over the most stupid, mundane things. These are RL trolls, the difference being they rarely get the opportunity to spread their bile over a wide area. The internet allows this.

Trolls throughout history can be seen in religion and politics, and often they had the ear of many people, via a pulpit, court, pamphleteering.

Don't fall into the mistake of thinking of the internet as a new means of communication - it's a new technology for communicating.
 
Diamond said:
Right, now here's, IMO, the interesting bit: the reaction of 4chan. It's less clear cut than the others and even more rambling so, well, good luck if you decide to read it.

Firstly, it's important to identify what we talk about when we talk about 4chan.

As far as I understand it, though I'm no expert, 4chan is almost the loosest possible congregation of individuals that you could establish on the internet.

It's boundaries are so diffuse and its barriers to entry so low that it's nigh on impossible to say where it ends and where it begins when identifying 'members'.

The only way to identify 4chan is to point towards the boards themselves. The pictures and comments that are already up there.

But such a delineation is almost meaningless in attempting a ham-fisted pop-psych analysis such as I'm trying to conduct here.

We're not really interested in the information that is posted up on the board, we're really interested in the people who post up the information, why they do it, why they think it's acceptable, why they wouldn't do it anywhere else.

The point I'm trying to get at is pretty obvious.

4chan is the perfect exemplification of the online disinhibition effect. It's pure anonymity (at least in the immediate access, if not in the true trail of the internet account) lifts all social restrictions from its 'members', if one can even talk about people being a 'member' of a community whose strength lies in the invisibility of its 'members'.

There's a really good NYT article on trolling here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/m...pagewanted=1&_r=3&sq=troll 4chan&st=cse&scp=1

where they describe the effect of 4chan as a reverse panopticon here:



Broadly speaking this is the effect of the internet generally in social interactions. With no fixed centre, or hierarchy, or means of establishing an individual's provenance, the centre is whatever we happen to be focusing on at any given point in time.

In this way it can provide a disorientating total collapse of the social horizon.

Moreover as we scrabble about in this cascade of information, not knowing how to judge it, where it comes from, it's location or relationship to the overall picture of society, our ability to judge our own position in society falls away too.

The remoteness of sitting behind the computer screen, feeling an almost invulnerable sense of anonymity makes us bolder and, for some, far more aggressive than we would be in real life. The two feed on each other, the disorientation and aggressiveness inflating egos and making people more liable to attack, more liable to take offence.

Because social boundaries have been removed, we feel a sense of proprietary ownership over the whole of our internet experience. We gain so much value and identity from what we discover online, if we do mediate much of our experience through the online world, that we feel that our regular places are strictly ours, despite the patent absurdity of that position.

It's a similar tendency to kids or toddlers refusing to let others play with their toys, except here we make the fundamental mistake that there is only one toy and it is no-one's to control, least of all our own.

These two tendencies, the collapse of the social horizon and the creation of a sense of direct ownership, inform why people react so stridently online. People say things they wouldn't normally say, exercising emotional responses that wouldn't normally be triggered, permitting reactions and escalations that would never be countenanced in real life.

Finally, to those who dismiss 4chan and say they're just a bunch of geeks. Admittedly we have now way of knowing the demographics behind the boards, but I think it's absurd to wave them all away offhand. I'm sure virtually everyone on this site has laughed at 4chan content.

Hell, the on ur boardz thread is one of the most popular in urban history.

I refuse to believe that 4chan's 'members' are congenital idiots and uniquely amoral individuals who never retreat from their screens into the light of day.
That path just seems a typical cop-out. Thar be monsters...

I suspect that there is no common factor that links 4chan members to any others apart from the fact that they go on 4chan.

Recently there was a thread on here which asked whether posters' personalities or identities were any different online to off.

IIRC, by and large people found it difficult to say, but most seemed to be in the consensus that they were the same person in both societies.

This seems absurd to me. We all have multiple identities that we switch between during any given day: to our friends, to our family, to our colleagues.

Your identity and your personality is, within broad boundaries, variable, not fixed.

When people visit 4chan, I would argue, that a small part of their identity becomes sublimated into the ethos and culture of 4chan.

I very much doubt that 4chan acts in a seductive way, attracting the wrong'uns to their natural hideout from all around the globe.

On the contrary I would argue that it acts in an influential way on each individual whenever they visit it, informing and claiming part of that person's identity and value system for however long they visit it. I guess what I'm saying is that the potential for /b/ is in all of us.

So pulling both strands together.

There are no /b/tards. We are all /b/tards. We are so because of the direct effect the internet has on our social value systems. That is something worth thinking about it.
Click to expand...

tl;dr;)
 
Chris-Chan is an interesting one.

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Sonichu

Considerably more so than Boxxy who's just a passing fad.

This poor blokes been suffering the hate machine for years now. He has been on the end of almost everything, accounts being hacked, tricked into sending out nudes, IRL harassment, magical sonichu (his crossover sonic and pikachu imaginary friend/comic book character/son/idol) medallions being stolen. the perfect target in net terms, but thanks to a level of ignorance he is somewhat immune to the attacks.

Since chanology though there has been an apparent rise in the numbers of so called "moralfags" which is possibly evident in people now wanting Chris-Chans ED article taken down. Suggestions being that they had gone too far..

The problem with Chris-Chan, who is clearly mentally handicapped in some way, is that he falls so amazingly for the pranks every time. Recent antics see him threatening to sue the head of Nintendo for being gay (he is increadbly homophobic) after some troll sent him a number of fake emails from the head saying they would not be making a sonichu game as there was straight kissing in it.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=9miYrMZIxuE&feature=channel_page

I think after all these years of abuse the /b/tards are either getting bored or feeling a little guilty though I doubt it, they've probably just squeezed all the lulz they can out of the poor bloke. If the ED article does go theres always the possiblity of another civil board war which despite the boxxy incident getting so much attention is nothing new these dramas occur every couple of months.
 
I want to feel sorry for that guy because he's clearly not all there, but he's such an unpleasant character (racist, misogynist, very homophobic and something of a sex pest as well) that it's hard not to dislike him intensely.
 
kyser_soze said:
Think about what trolling actually is as a behvaioural form, rather than the medium it manifests itself in. Think about the person who routinely complains about everything, or the friend who endlessly picks fights over the most stupid, mundane things. These are RL trolls, the difference being they rarely get the opportunity to spread their bile over a wide area. The internet allows this.

Trolls throughout history can be seen in religion and politics, and often they had the ear of many people, via a pulpit, court, pamphleteering.

Don't fall into the mistake of thinking of the internet as a new means of communication - it's a new technology for communicating.
Click to expand...

I think what this really comes down to then is whether new technological developments can change the manner in which people think.

That's not a very attractive idea for a lot of people: that your mind is somehow subordinate to the world around it. It goes against a lot of, and I'm being deliberately wishy-washy here, spiritual notions, and a lot of ingrained perceptions about the resilience and uniqueness of the self. In short, it's intuitively repugnant.

But I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that techonolgical changes in human history have through directly impacting on human behaviour changed the way we think as a whole.

There's an interesting passage from an Arthur Koestler book (Darkness at Noon) that I read a while back. Unfortunately I don't seem to have it any more. I'll try to get hold of a copy and use that passage as a jumping off point. Watch this space. ;)
 
I think what this really comes down to then is whether new technological developments can change the manner in which people think.

That's not a very attractive idea for a lot of people: that your mind is somehow subordinate to the world around it. It goes against a lot of, and I'm being deliberately wishy-washy here, spiritual notions, and a lot of ingrained perceptions about the resilience and uniqueness of the self. In short, it's intuitively repugnant.

But I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that techonolgical changes in human history have through directly impacting on human behaviour changed the way we think as a whole.
Click to expand...

OK, but you've not given any examples of how technology has changed the way people think; also, I think you're very wrong about that first paragraph - most people would be happy with the notion of the external world changing the way they think (for example, when you're a child learning not to put your hand in a fire).

However, I'd like to see a concrete example of technology changing the way we think.
 
When you're driving a car, the way you think about public space, other people and your relationship to them, is changed. You're insulated from them and feel less empathy.
 
Benedict Anderson uses newspapers as an example of the way an imagined community is created - a daily paper creates the idea of a readership who have certain features and interests in common.
 
Making important decisions based on phone calls with the 2nd party is a different matter compared to doing it face-to-face. So much more can be figured out from a person when you get all the extra communication that isn't verbal.
 
So do you guys agree with diamond's basic argment that the internet as a technology has created the behaviour known as 'trolling' in humans, rather than simply magnifying/augmenting an existing behavioural trait?

Benedict Anderson uses newspapers as an example of the way an imagined community is created - a daily paper creates the idea of a readership who have certain features and interests in common.
Click to expand...

Maybe Mr Anderson should read a Bible or Koran, cos they do the same thing.
 
Yeah is does; that description is a feature of any media content, from religious texts down to the smallest fanzine.
 
I'm afraid I just don't see it with religious texts like the bible - they are too disparate, too self-contradictory and written over too great a time, plus they are set in stone in the way that a daily paper isn't, so they can't be a reflection (and a construction) of a shared experience and a shared response to events that are specifically selected for their relevance to a particular group; i.e. they can't act as a filter of current events in order to select and present them as part of the life-world of an imagined community. A fanzine is a different case and I'd be more inclined to agree with you, but the readership are self-selecting based on a previous interest in a specific subject, so there isn't quite the same scope to lead their interest in one direction or the other.
 
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