2009, May
Pattern Recognition
When I read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, I started dreaming about real-life "footage."
Where on the internet could people come together spontaneously to discuss a mystery, one that unfolds in real time? Where could someone go to release anonymous works of art, works that might go unnoticed until they were actively sought, works that could be canonized by the crowd, so to speak.
At first, I thought the footage would be on 4chan. To most people, this probably sounds stupid (and in retrospect, I have to admit it was), but I don’t think most people realize what 4chan really is. 4chan is a completely anonymous imageboard, and much of the conversation focuses around what I’m going to call “seed posts” featuring images. 4chan is an orgy of anarchy, where you can find conversations ranging from tame technical discussions about model trains to fans of anime and online gaming to hardcore and fetish porn. The most popular part of 4chan is /b/, the “random” board, widely known as the cesspool of the internet. I thought the footage might be here, casually referenced in some rogue post, but 4chan is really like a pool, where the biggest splashes get the most attention and every ripple is drowned out by a wave.
I spent several weeks doing a sort-of-cultural-anthropology study of 4chan. I have been known to obsess over subcultures, and this was no different. I found one thing of value on 4chan–and one thing only–a maxim: if you allow it, your soul will sink to the lowest common denominator faster than you can say “/b/tard.” Despite brief flashes of brilliance, 4chan’s /b/ has the collective maturity of a 4 year old. The works that /b/ excretes are cultural pastiche; they are parasitic and upsettingly viral. You are, no doubt, familiar with lolcats?
To cut a longer story short, I now believe that we will find the footage, and the footage-heads, on Twitter. On Twitter, or some secret service just like it, conversations exist in an immense, searchable semantic space. Ad-hoc thread tagging (#hashtags) has brought IRC-like channels into existence: third-party apps debut every day with the sole intention of tracking and exposing conversations on Twitter. Keeping abreast of any conversant is as easy as clicking Follow.
The recent @reply controversy is somewhat indicative of the power of Twitter to expose users to a thriving social ecosystem they didn’t even know they were on the fringes of. Only 3% of all Twitter users ever changed the @reply setting, which allowed you to view tweets addressed to other users in your Home stream, but there was a noticeable uproar when Twitter unexpectedly removed the option. As it turns out, this feature weighed heavy on the technological infrastructure of the site (which has been known to fail under the pressure of millions of unique visitors per month).
A quick perusal of the public timeline can expose you to people around the world that you would never find otherwise (and this has consequences for the composition of our virtual and IRL social networks).
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