Presentation Preview

The presentation I’ll be giving in class this week will highlight the research I’ve done so far and give a quick overview of why I think language has manifest itself on the internet the way it has, by way of speakers who have the same goals in communication both online and off. A quick runthrough of my main points:

• Language, since the beginning, has been a collaborative and collective effort of people to understand each other.
• The implementation of writing allowed us to be physically separate from our message, and in many ways to be anonymous. 
• In this framework, the message becomes more important than the author; we no longer have to sumbit to the oral wisdom of the elders.
• This physical separation also becomes somewhat isolating; this becomes manifest on a global scale with the rise of the internet.  Not only does it allow us to communicate with those who are geographically distant; cyberspace is a new context/place all its own, and interacting there is something new and “other.”
• We experience individualization, but also isolation.  We are free to break taboo and to say what we want, but we are also limited in our ability to express our true identity.
• We want to figure out new and meaninful ways to connect and interact – a group to identify with.
• The creation of internet languages like l334, lolcats, and the banter on sites like 4chan fulfills this desire for an in-group.
• However, among the millions of faceless people posting on the internet, communication that is largely text-based has to extreme to draw the attention its author needs to feel legitimated.  Here we get the seemingly hateful, obscene and derogatory comments common on /b/ and other sites.
• As terrible as some of these comments seem, they may be Anonymous’s way of fulfilling basic needs for interaction and affirmation in cyberspace; Anonymous may be anti-identity, but they are not anti-human.  Albeit through complex and chaotic means, they are people with the desire to connect.  They are like us.  They ARE us.

I will be drawing on Clive Thompson’s ideas about ambient intimacy, as well as my previous look into memetics and observations of 4chan threads.  I hope to pull the theoretical sources we’ve been looking at in class so far to provide a base for the behavior we see manifest on the sites we’ve been studying, and show that even more than subjects to be studied, the people posting material on 4chan (while it may seem juvenile or disgusting at times) are real people with the same goals in communication as those we talk to offline.