Mint Lily Cherbet-Bouchard
2010
Last year I had written a research paper about the use of images on the imageboard website 4chan.org, a home to transgressive and offensive communication and the emerging point for the activist/hacker “group” called Anonymous. When I was searching for books about 4chan and Anonymous I came across this Createspace published text that had pretty poor reviews on Amazon. Well, I ordered the book regardless of everyone’s warnings and, as it turns out, it is just as irrelevant as the reviews suggested. Its major problem is that the book does not distinguish between 4chan.org users and Anonymous.
I don’t know anything about the author aside from the fact that there’s a facebook page stating that she is a student at UC Berkeley. She also apparently uses 4chan.org and I guess an enthusiastic professor or course instructor encouraged her to publish something based on this phenomenon that has, so far, little literature devoted to it. The book itself is all text (despite being about an image-oriented website), and is largely composed of semi-coherent discussions of aspects of the Anonymous/4chan subculture (including ruminations on anonymity and mainstream media portrayals of the group, and thoughts on things like the use of offensive language).
The other major component of the text is excerpts of posts to 4chan’s /b/ (random) board, where people have outrageous discussions about weird things and make jokes about suicide and post bizarre images with their writings. Cherbet-Bouchard discusses a mostly incomprehensible vision for what Anonymous can be.
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