Influence on Western Culture? Why don't you go read the news, the Patterson break-up has had more of an effect on Western culture then 4Chan could ever hope to succeed.
Some people spend way too much time on the internet; I can guarantee you that 99% of America, has no clue what 4Chan, Rage Comics, lolcats is. Anonymous and the 1% movement (but you may have to say Occupy Wall Street to the 3 million remaining people) may be the exceptions because of the media coverage.
And meme's are far from profound, humor, yes you could argue to be considered profound, but meme's? A silly time-waster at best but generally worse then a joke told among friends. You can't find a meme and share it with friends with the same impact (whether online or in person) as:
One day little girl comes home from school, "Mom, today some boy showed me his penis."
Mother exclaims "What?!"
Little girl says "Yea, and it sort of reminded me of a peanut."
Trying not to laugh, mother asks "Is that because it was so small?"
Little girl laughs says "No. Because it tasted so salty."
I can't believe I'm saying this but it's almost offensive to me that you're comparing 4chan to celebrity news. 4chan is friggin' high art compared to that shit. Celebrity news is the lowest of the low; nothing but easy-to-read brain candy for bored, boring housewives.
And I think 4chan has a huge influence. It is a very powerful site in tech culture, which is pretty large I think. Tech culture might be smaller by numbers than the so-called mainstream but it's plenty large enough to be self-sustaining and have its own sense of identity.
The argument isn't that 4chan doesn't have its own identity, its refuting this:
And come on, it's where all the memes are born. That's profound. What other startup can claim to be such a big influence on western society?
I think 4chan definitely has a huge influence on the tech sector, but in terms of straight-up 'influence' vastly more people follow celebrity gossip than memes. That might change (it probably won't -- we're prone to hero-worship, whether or not its movie stars or tech icons).
Celebrity news is the lowest of the low; nothing but easy-to-read brain candy for bored, boring housewives.
I don't really read celebrity news, but I have read rage comics and memes back when Reddit had them frontpaged, and if you think they're more than easy-to-read brain candy, I think you're mistaken.
There is a chain. There is the World Wide Web, which is a mass indiscriminate content creator. Then you have 4chan, which functions as both an individual content creator on the WWW, and as a giant aggregator. 4chan users aggregate funny pictures they recontextualize from bad advertising, screenshots of incomprehensible dialog in TV shows, the best webcomics, etc. 4chan is a mostly a massive dumping ground filled with garbage, but because of the ephemeral nature of threads, result in only content that frequently gets reposted has a chance to survive the churn. Most people cannot stand this, and stay away. But 4chan is populated by content-addicted denizens, who process, filter and promote good memes. And then turn right around and push this content back out onto the more "respectable" and filtered, less-chaotic sites like Reddit and CheezeBurger Network, Facebook, which are meme-propagating machines in their own right. But they primarily get access to the content that was subjected to the vicious selection process of 4chan to begin with.
I think the process by which 4chan operates in media is far more sophisticated, less centralized, less commercial and (perhaps surprisingly) less cynical than celebrity gossip that is created en-masse for money by large national media corporations for top-down consumption. By the time a meme makes it to facebook it's been largely stripped of its participatory power and becomes a one-way medium, but that's just at the periphery of the meme-propogation, the people that just consume it with their electronic feed tubes. But the process of creating this content before it gets to the edge web is a chaotic, churning process of evolutionary competition, mutation, selection.
This is worthy of study. It is participatory culture in the making, what the creative commons and the free culture movement always wanted. There may not be a lot _fundamentally_ new here, except in the context of the 'net in which it is being created. And the medium shapes the message. The web is a "new place." and there are people in it that are, right now, creating the native language of a place that has never existed before. These are exciting times. I think that the messageboard one day will be recognized for it importannce in the history of the WWW, and the Internet in general.
That's a pretty brash claim. Shakespeare's been around for centuries, and has most likely been read or seen by more people in the sum of that time than celebrity news.
You forget, more people have lived since the end of the second world war, than lived between then and Shakespeare's time. If you also take into account the rise in global literacy, far more people will have read celebrity news than Shakespeare.
My guess is that anyone who is literate has read Shakespeare at least once. I have to imagine my public schooling is not that different from the norm, and I read at least 3 works as required (Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo & Juliet) and some other others as my choice for assignments.
At least, in the western world. I don't know how popular Shakespeare is outside of that. On the other hand, I don't know how popular celebrity news is either.
Monty Python was a silly joke, something friends would communicate amongst each other. It was a meme inside the UK, eventually sort of going global.
40 years since The Holy Grail was filmed, it is still often selected as the funniest film of all times.
There is an impact. But it is a young people's thing, give it some time and it will become part of the cultural heritage of the early 2000's and 2010's.
The thing is though, basically everyone worldwide who has been to university in the last few years has seen them and knows about them, and has laughed at them.
When those people grow up, and achieve control over the popular media, suddenly we'll start seeing references to this period of culture in the new media of the day. It'll be seen as much more important than it is now as well, as the educated middle classes exert their control over cultural memory.
Also at some point the children of todays students will likely decide that memes and early internet culture in general is retro, and it'll all be vogue again, and we can complain that it's not as good when its holographic or something.
This can be seen in music. Jazz used to be a scary sound that would cause your daughters to start having sex with black people, now it's the height of sophistication. At some point in the last 15 years hip-hop became an art form in the eyes of the media elite. The current resurgence in commercial rave music is partly to do with the veterans of the 90s scene being in a position to start large businesses. At some point in the future the extreme, venetian snares end of electronica will likely be looked upon as jazz/classical is now.
>suddenly we'll start seeing references to this period of culture in the new media of the day
It is already starting, just look at this job offer (it's German, but you'll understand the reference to rage comics at once):
While I get your point, I think much more than 1% of America is aware of the entity that is rage comics/lolcats/image macros. Pretty much every kid on the Internet these days knows what those things are or has seen them and is thus aware of them. The number will only increase.
Assuming, like you, that by "the 1% movement" we're talking about Occupy, then it should be pointed out that it was birthed by Adbusters. 4Chan had nothing to do with it, except in a very peripheral sense that could also be claimed by hundreds of other sites/groups/organizations.
I can guarantee you that 99% of America, has no clue what 4Chan, Rage Comics, lolcats is
I'm a high school teacher. I can guarantee you that 99% of kids 13-18 know what Rage Comics & lolcats are. The youth of today are the first Internet generation. They have spent their entire lives immersed in Internet culture. The true impact of this generation will start to be felt in 10-15 years.
Who's Patterson? The personal lives of celebrities tend to not make it into history. 4chan is at the very least the other guy who invented the telephone (or am I thinking light bulb) but got beat to the patent office.
Some people spend way too much time on the internet; I can guarantee you that 99% of America, has no clue what 4Chan, Rage Comics, lolcats is. Anonymous and the 1% movement (but you may have to say Occupy Wall Street to the 3 million remaining people) may be the exceptions because of the media coverage.
And meme's are far from profound, humor, yes you could argue to be considered profound, but meme's? A silly time-waster at best but generally worse then a joke told among friends. You can't find a meme and share it with friends with the same impact (whether online or in person) as:
One day little girl comes home from school, "Mom, today some boy showed me his penis." Mother exclaims "What?!" Little girl says "Yea, and it sort of reminded me of a peanut." Trying not to laugh, mother asks "Is that because it was so small?" Little girl laughs says "No. Because it tasted so salty."