Presentation for Creative Writing in Digital Spaces

1. 4chan
By Sterling Crawford

2. The King of Image Boards
• 4chan, like other image
boards, began as a forum to
discuss anime.
• With popularity, some websites
grew to develop multiple
boards each revolving around
a certain topic.
• There are many image boards,
but 4chan is probably the most
famous(infamous?)

3. Reputation
• You can’t talk about 4chan without talking about
controversy.
• Most people, if they are aware of the site at all, believe it to
simply be a meeting place for radical political ideologues,
porn enthusiasts, gore fans, and other such digital
miscreants.
• Most of this only happens on two or three boards. Most of
the boards, especially the ones pertinent to digital story
telling, are free of pornography and ISIS combat
compilations.

4. Format
• The website is characterized by it’s minimal and perhaps
dated looking interface.
• There are no accounts. Everything is posted anonymously.
Each post is associated with a unique string of numbers.
• There is no voting system. Posts are made into a feed, the
feed being a part of a catalog. Each board’s catalog is
composed of recently made/bumped posts.
• The moderation policies are relaxed, and the boards direct
themselves based on content posted by “anons”

5. Style
• The format of 4chan directly de-influences style
• Anonymity means that style of writing becomes the
only actual identity available to people reading the
post.
• No voting system means that a post you make can
be found for as long as people are still commenting
on it.

7. Communities
• Each community has both a
respective topic and
accompanying culture
• /Lit/ is probably one of the best
places on the internet to
discuss literature and
philosophy. Culture is often
discussed too.
• Many posters on /lit/ are writers
and enthusiasts themselves.

10. Greentext
• Greentext is a 4chan born genre and style of writing
stories.
• The > symbol proceeds each line of the greentext
story.
• Typically, the stories are extremely concise and meant
to lead a reader from point to point.
• Stories are usually thought of as true events, but some
examples of greentext would suggest otherwise.

13. Meme Magic
• Meme are everywhere nowadays.
• 4chan is the artisanal stronghold of memes
• Memes often contextualize posts and often
start off as simple images with no text
• Memes and the images of the board act as a
secondary, symbolic language which adorns
and elaborates the text of each post.
• Memes are created quickly in order to properly
commentate on social movements or cultural
artifacts that are relevant at any given time.
• website allows for many different origins,
groups, and subcultures to intersect and
exchange things like jargon, phrases, formats,
etc

14. Thank You!