/pol/emics: Ambiguity, scales, and digital discourse on 4chan. (August 2018) - Ludemann, Dillon
Highlights: 4chan's anonymous, web-based interaction has complicated traditional discourse. Users on 4chan have created novel ways of interaction and performing identity. New understandings of scale must be applied within digital linguistic anthropology. Abstract: This paper will explore the ways in which online, anonymous interaction on the website4chan.org can complicate traditionally situated discursive theory. Through an examination of the politically incorrect board (/pol/), this paper begins to reanalyze scale, alignment, and double-voicing approaches in ways that necessitate novel understandings of digitally placed discourse. This website has demonstrated unique engagements with these categories, engaging with global and personal discourses through anonymity, geographically "situated" flag markers, and green-text narrative techniques, among others. This essay contains a number of examples found through 4chan's /pol/ via qualitative-oriented, inscriptive gathering techniques of discourses concerning both the continuing European and American migration issues, as they are explored by a globally situated, digital community. Through banal, everyday engagements with both the material and the website features themselves, users craft new realizations of identity and interaction in a space that seeks to make all anonymous.