Here are the sources I plan to use.
I hope to, first and foremost, to find enough material in Foucault's "What is an Author" to base my entire paper one. I like his ideas of circumventing the author, the meaning of an author's name (in 4chan, simply, Anonymous, which has already made its way into popular culture especially with hacker attacks on various organizations), the history of author function and how it culminates 4chan's author-absence. Etc.
I will also use two sources from Computers and Composition written 11 years apart:
"The Author-Function, The Genre Function, and The Rhetoric of Scholarly Webtexts" by Christopher Basgier
Abstract: In this article, I compare Michel Foucault's (1994) author-function and Anis Bawarshi's (2000) genre function as explanations for the use, categorization, and value of scholarly webtexts. I focus much of my analysis on Anne Frances Wysocki's (2002) “A Bookling Monument” because it is explicitly designed to destabilize our reading practices. I also situate Wysocki's webtext along a spectrum with Charles Lowe's (2004) “Copyright, Access, and Digital Texts” and Collin Gifford Brooke's (2002) “Perspective: Notes Toward the Remediation of Style.” In using the author-function and the genre function as lenses on these pieces, I aim to articulate multiple possible modes of being for scholarly webtexts and their users. In the process, I illustrate the ways these concepts speak to the status and social function of authorial ownership and originality; multimodal complexity; and formal reflexivity. Ultimately, I argue that bringing traditional concepts like authorship and genre to bear on scholarly webtexts not only reveals the values of the Computers and Writing community but also presents a unique opportunity to continue testing the uses and limits of our rhetorical theories.
This article also uses "What is an Author" but also includes information on Genre and scholarship on the web. I will use the article to attempt to define a new genre of writing, the image board, and how it not only shapes the kind of writing that happens, but creates a new system of text-production that is inextricably linked with images, one in which image and text give meaning to each other and are, in some cases, meaningless without the other. Finally, if feasible, I will justify the use of public image boards as a legitimate forum for academic discussion, one in which even the uneducated are free to participate, resulting, maybe, in a more democratic dissemination of knowledge.
"The Evolution of Internet Genres," Marcy Lassota Bauman
Abstract: New Internet writing environments differ significantly from print forms. They allow texts to evolve—to change their purpose and audience over time. They allow for new forms of collaboration—texts organize themselves without an omniscient editor shaping them. As a profession, we need to understand and experiment with these forms.
I will use this article to more clearly define the function of the image board. Although this piece was written in 1999, it is relevant to 4chan, which is still primitive in its design (it started in 2003 and hasn't changed since) and is based on a model which came before it. If space permits, I may examine 4chan's popularity in the face of more modern, complex, interactive and pretty websites.
The next three articles are from CCC
Peter Elbow, "The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing"
Abstract: Written words are laid out in space and exist on the page all at once, but a reader can
only read a few words at a time. For readers, written words are trapped in the medium
of time. So how can we best organize writing for readers? Traditional techniques of
organization tend to stress the arrangement of parts in space and certain metadiscoursal
techniques that compensate for the problem of time. In contrast, I’ll describe five ways
to organize written language that harness or bind time. In effect, I’m exploring form as
a source of energy. More broadly, I’m implying that our concept itself of “organization”
is biased toward a picture of how objects are organized in space and neglects the story
of how events are organized in time.
I choose this because Elbow is so popular within our community and citing him might help legitimize my paper. But also because talks about writing a paper which doesn't need to be read linearly to be understood, but can be looked at all at once to extract all relevant information. He uses the metaphor of an ant trying to understand a painting by walking across it vs. a birds eye view of the painting which reveals it all at once. I will argue that 4chan, through its organization, allows such a birds eye view. One, at times, needn't even read the post to know if he wants to read it, the image accompanying the text will be an indicator as to whether or not its worth his while. I'm not sure yet to what extent, great or small, I will use this article.
D. Diane Davis, "Finitude’s Clamor; Or,
Notes toward a Communitarian Literacy"
Abstract: To the extent that rhetoric and writing studies bases its theories and pedagogies on the
self-present composing subject—the figure of the writer who exists apart from the writing
context, from the “world,” from others—it is anti-communitarian. Communication
can take place only among beings who are given over to the “outside,” exposed, open to
the other’s effraction. This essay therefore calls for the elaboration of a “communitarian”
literacy that understands reading and writing as functions of this originary sociality, as
expositions not of who one is (identity) but of the fact that “we” are (community).
This paper is useful in understanding the relationship between individual contributors to 4chan. Mainly, I will argue that when a poster attempts to assert his individuality he is immediately marginalized by the group, but when the whole gathers into a single collective, their force is unstoppable. The individual is anti-social, the group is communitarian, and, given the right conditions (which are spontaneously determined and can seldom be repeated), the community can exert power outside of itself (which I will show later with my Wired Magazine articles).
Brian Jackson and Jon Wallin's "Rediscovering the “Back-and-Forthness” of Rhetoric in the Age of YouTube"
Abstract: Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate
in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of
the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical,
and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public
deliberation effective and how we can teach students to deliberate.
I may or may not use this article since 4chan is neither web 2.0, nor anything like YouTube in terms of organization. However, there are moments in which members actively interact with each other and have a real rhetorical influence on one another (such as in the famous example of Train Man).
I will use the Train Man's story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Densha_Otoko), maybe, to appeal to the sentimental side of my audience (does it exist?). This is a famous and early example on the influence of the image board, 2channel (the Japanese precursor to 4chan), on popular culture. In short, a thread that was started on the site brought the community together to support a man in a particular situation he needed help with. This later led to a movie, TV show, books, a play, etc.
Finally, I have found several articles on Wired Magazine's website which directly reference 4chan. These articles are all basically about the real-world influence the site has had on culture. From producing internet memes which have found their way into everyday life (LOLcats) to its power to make no-names famous (Train Man, Creepy Chan) to its ability to spontaneously come together in its attacks against such companies and organizations as AT&T and the Church of Scientology.
If I follow the order of these articles, which was random but strangely makes sense, my paper will be organized something like this:
How author-absence and the genre of image board are central to text production on 4chan and is the reason for its popularity and influence. How its organization is useful for new inquiries into discourse, communication, rhetoric and pedagogy. How the site has proven able to enact real social influence (something our community may learn from), not through sheer numbers (like Facebook), but through it's ultimate lack of authorial presence (I hope to bring it back full circle to Foucault).
