My name is Jenna Holloway. I am a rising Junior at Cornell majoring in Information Science with special interest in Human Computer Interaction Design. I am a graduate of the Japanese FALCON program, an intensive year long, three semester program in Japanese language study. My hobbies include video games, doodling, internet culture, and casual non-stressful exercising. I also enjoy eating marshmellows in the rain, racing people up stairways, and attempting to be humorous.
I am interested in the online "#Chan" communities. The chan websites are often referred to as "the dark beating heart of the internet". They produce many of the online memes (i.e. the LOLCats, O RLY owls, and the "I'm in your blank, blanking your blank" memes) and carry out large scale anonymous hacker attacks on users and websites.
The chans are all presented in forum style. This type of website is referred to by Wallace as an "asynchronous forum". Chan websites attract hundreds and thousands of people to post anonymously on their forums. Each forum board, titled with a letter, is dedicated to a different topic. The letters are more or less uniform across all chans. For example, board /i/ stands for Invasion, /b/ stands for Random, etc. If you have never been to a chan website, some common English chans are 4chan, 420chan, 7chan, or 12chan. (Warning: visiting a chan website can lead to potentially disturbing images, content, and language so proceed at your own risk)
The original and biggest chan is 2chan.net started in Japan and is all in Japanese. The Japanese chan started the concept of "invasion" or attack on other websites and people. They have attacked many people over the years, one of the most famous being David Arudo, an American who moved to Japan (went to Cornell, actually) and started a blog on becoming a citizen. 2chan attacked his blog and Arudo sued 2chan in Japanese court. 2chan's owner reportedly said during the litigation that he would only pay if there was the death penalty involved. The whole thing got very involved, so you can read more of the story at Arudo's blog here.
Chan users are collectively termed "Anonymous". Anonymous has been known to carry out many "attacks" on various people and websites. They form these attacks on their invasion board. Some of the more recent attacks have shut down christian teen websites, a local fox news website, a virtual pet website (subeta), and many personal blogs and myspace pages and accounts. Each chan group has its own personality. They tend to "invade" or attack people when they think they will get a good laugh out of it and it will be a challenge. (They tend to refer to this as getting "Epic Lulz", or at least according to fox news. ) Groups of Anonymous often move from chan to chan when one chan gets shut down or hacked.
The most intriguing parts of the chan websites is that their users are always dynamic and always unidentifiable. Sometimes, if a user identifies himself on a chan website, he will immediately become the target of an invasion himself, so this keeps incentive to stay anonymous.
So, my question is this: What motivates a completely anonymous group of ever changing users to carry out attacks on other websites and people? Its not personal recognition. Its often not for personal revenge. Its not for some "moral" ideological purpose. Its purely crazy, mass mob, anonymous groups moving around the internet attacking people.
If you are interested in learning more about the chan phenomenon, you may want to watch fox news' coverage of the Chans here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pyR_90RdOg (albeit this is a little sensationalized).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I think they do it solely for the attention. They obviously get a kick out of attacking these other websites in anonymity and there is some sort of self-gratification they are getting out of it. I mean it's ok to see both sides of a debate or issue but to just attack websites shows that they are completely biased in most of their thinking. In a way they are voicing their opinion but I would much rather them do it in an organized and sophisticated manner.
Post a Comment