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BigRed0427 posted:I was always fascinated by Anon and what they accomplished with Project Chanology and the other raids they performed. I think I eventually figured out what 4chan was really doing was childish and downright mean. ... Fast forward to the past year or so and, from an outsider's perspective it looks like 4chan and other chan boards have become truly vile places. Or maybe they always have been vile and I just figured it out. This basically equals my impressions of the Chans as well. It was only a few years ago that I sort of admired 4chan, especially Anonymous and the escapades they went on about. I used to think one's opinion on Anonymous roughly equalled one's own hope for humanity; for every unambiguously bad or childishly mean thing Anon did, they also usually had one unambiguously good thing as well. Ergo, if you liked them or not largely depended on your own personal convictions as opposed to anything Anon itself specifically did. Strangely though, I haven't heard much about Anonymous specifically, at least in a long time. There was once a time when they garnered rather highly interested media attention, at least here in Canada. Are they still active in hacktivism at all? Are they still connected with the chans, or are they their own thing now?
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May 14, 2015 02:20
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:Was nerddom always like this? Like back during the 90s, was nerd more associated with academic achievement rather than being way too into some fandom? I think I remember some sociology papers back then outlining how nerds were on average much more socially progressive than today. What gave? I think there was a very brief period of time where one was a "nerd" whenever they actively liked something that was outside of the popular culture mainstream. This was a remnant of the TV broadcast age where you were largely told by large media systems what were the things that you were supposed to like, rather than deciding that for yourself. To call someone a "nerd" dismissively implied that they were interested in something which you and your social group thought was largely irrelevant to the common interest -- to deny the individual strengths they had over you, (e.g., they know a lot about some thing that you know nothing about, including various school subjects,) to triumph in the collective strength of being "normal" people. A problem then arose as the Internet became more and more commonly available, with its wealth of useless information, and thus the cultural mainstream got downplayed as more and more people were free to develop their own interests and meet similar groups. Under the same logic, everyone then became a nerd to some degree. Whereas beforehand there would've only been a few select nerds available at any given time, now everyone is a nerd in some way and can't avoid that. icantfindaname posted:I think it's very important to distinguish nerddom from education/intellectualism. They're really not the same thing at all, the only real connection is that people bad at athletics and social interaction are overrepresented in both because athletics and social interaction as areas of achievement are closed off to them. Fried Chicken posted:Let's stop calling it "nerd culture"; defining your identity by what you consume is not culture. Everything they adhere was cooked up to fall within defined age/sex/disposable income/distribution region parameters assembled with ISO9000 compliance to Six Sigma standards 25 years ago by some snake in a suit so he could hit is quarterly bonus metrics. Any shared "language" is them referencing a consumed product because they have been marketed that referencing the familiar with a twist is the same as humor. Their "shared priorities" are consuming the products set to be rolled out next quarter. Their "common knowledge" is a series of iterative trivia about products they have consumed. This is not a culture, this is a market segment. Also these. (Goodness, this thread is moving quickly.) Morroque fucked around with this message at 02:48 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 02:42
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Fried Chicken posted:No, it doesn't. Sports culture is organic, it grows, creates, and reshapes, and has evolved over thousands of years. It has laws and social structures. Changes to it come from the interactions of those within it. "Nerd culture" doesn't, the new things are handed to it from the outside, with the outside selling them on what their new direction will be. It isn't people developing a way it interact, it is their way of interacting being marketed to them. There is no law of social structure, a key part of this is that there is no method to clamp down on a misbehaving member - that's a result of the fact that the structure comes from the outside. It is a consumer demographic. More than that, "nerd culture" is aggressively, violently hostile to any attempt to do anything new coming from within it. The whole reason we are talking about it is because when some of the members of it started to interact in new ways, like acknowledging that they were anything but straight white males, they started getting rape threats, death threats, and attempts on their lives. Do you have any sources you could use to confirm this a little further? I've always wanted to make more specific correlations between consumerism and popular culture as it is expressed, but lacked a good basis. If you have anything, I would be interested in reading it. I am only asking because, while I feel inclined to agree with you, I also see that the distinction you are making between the two is actually quite sutble for all it affects. One could just as easily observe the involved timescales required for cultural evolution as an argument for "Well, they only seem resistant to change because it takes a long time for it to do so," which would completely ignore the from-within/from-without element you are referring to.
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May 14, 2015 06:44
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If we are going to talk about male insecurity as transformed by 4chan and the like, it would likely be important to note the long view while doing so. Masculine insecurity has a long and colourful history. I only just recently read a book on the topic. To shorten the thesis with slight risk of misrepresenting it: If post-gamergate 4chan and its kin have become a kind of homosocial refuge from the pressures and expectations of the larger emasculating society, then they are doomed to failure just like every previous kind of homosocial perserve that came before it. This kind of problem predates even protofeminism. It didn't work then, and it's not going to work now. Gantolandon posted:People who spend most of their time on forums try to analyze why some other people spend all of their time on other forums and call them shut-ins. Ian Winthorpe III posted:Addicted to the narcissism of small difference. Sectarianism is one hell of a drug.
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May 14, 2015 22:41
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