Rating:
(49 reviews)
Author: Cole Stryker
ISBN : B005GSZZK6
New from $10.99
Format: PDF, EPUB
You can download Free Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link 4chan is the "Anti-Facebook," a site that radically encourages anonymity. It spawned the hacktivist group Anonymous, which famously defended WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by bringing down MasterCard's and Visa's Web sites. Created by a 15-year-old wunderkind in 2003, it is the creative force behind "the Web's most infectious memes and catchphrases" (
Wired). Today it has over 12 million monthly users, with enormous social influence to match.
Epic Win is the first book to tell 4chan's story. Longtime blogger and 4chan expert Cole Stryker writes with a voice that is engrossingly informative and approachable. Whether examining the 4chan- provoked Jessi Slaughter saga and how cyber-bullying is part of our new reality, or explaining how Sarah Palin's email account was leaked,
Epic Win for Anonymous proves 4chan's transformative cultural impact, and how it has influenced--and will continue to influence-- society at large.
Direct download links available for Free Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 403 KB
- Print Length: 304 pages
- Publisher: Overlook (September 1, 2011)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005GSZZK6
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #464,178 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Free Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
So I'll start by saying that I found the first few sections of the book to be pretty boring. They're primarily introduction content but assume that the reader knows absolutely nothing about the internet at all. At first I was thought "Well this book is going to be a total drag," but I realized that this book was different than what I was expecting. With a subtitle like "How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web," I was expecting an opinionated viewpoint on why Anonymity matters and how one example (4chan) proves that it can accomplish tremendous goals. Instead, this reads more like required reading for a college course entitled "4chan 101." Which isn't a bad thing, I just wasn't expecting it.
In terms of how the author manages to teach all the various learnings of the internet, I have to say he did a pretty good job. There's a few chapters dedicated to "memes" and how they've defined most people's internet experiences. The more interesting chapters focus on how 4chan or Anonymous have affected the world through a few small actions. Such as how PR and Marketing companies have started attempting to create memes or content that people who visit 4chan would talk about. It's fascinating.
My experience with the subject material is somewhat adequate. I've visited 4chan for a little over a year which I understand doesn't give me a lot of credibility but I'm familiar with various memes and slang used on 4chan that most people probably wouldn't understand. If you're someone like me than the first hundred pages or so of this book with be a little too brain dead simple for you care.
There's a lot of this book that's not really about 4chan or Anonymous, but about the development of unmoderated or awfulness-seeking sites on the web. The book makes for a primary document in its own right, insofar as it shows how someone can recognize how hostile certain spaces are to women and still not connect that with his own judgments about those spaces' "importance." Stryker contends that 4Chan is the source of most web memes and therefore the most fascinating place on the web. Maybe a biographer often buys into a subject's own narrative.
I'm more interested in the gender stuff: Stryker reports that there aren't many women on 4chan (how we know this is unclear, but I'm not arguing) and that it's pretty hostile to women, except for female cosplayers and for visitors to /cm (Cute/Male anime, separate from the main Cute anime board--which does clearly reflect the marked status of women). So "[t]he 4chan adage `There are no girls on the Internet' suggests that anyone claiming to be a woman is actually a man either trolling or getting a sexual thrill out of posting as a woman," and women who post pictures of themselves get encouraged to strip, so that "4chan's relationship with women is weird and sad." But not 4chan's users? Or only when they're on 4chan? He also says that yaoi is naked male anime but yuri is femslash; this may be true of how 4chan boards define the terms, but somebody is a little nervous about anime guys having sex with other guys. 4chan also revels in the use of offensive terms, and Stryker has a good conversation with Lisa Nakamura about the thrill of shock value and the desire not to be held responsible for consequences of racist and sexist abuse.
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