The great thing about trolling is that anyone who doesn’t get it becomes part of the joke. You may have noticed this story about 4chan on the front page of FOXNews.com. I laughed when I read it, and I imagine anyone familiar with 4chan will have a similar reaction to it. You may also remember that this isn’t the first time FOX has covered this — there’s the about “Anonymous: Hackers on Steroids.”
Despite being grossly inaccurate, they’re hilarious to us. Why? Because, by taking us too seriously, they’ve become part of the joke. It’s also rather flattering for FOX to refer to /b/tards as “the most powerful people on the Internet,” though it obviously isn’t true (I’d make a power level joke, but I’m just not in the mood.).
It doesn’t surprise me that FOX has no interest in facts or actual journalism, nor, I imagine, does it surprise anyone reading this. And it is pretty bad: Notice the article is filed under ‘Science and Technology,’ apparently because 4chan is a website. Even better, here’s what they have to say about memes:
Recurring jokes on 4chan sometimes spread out into the wider Web to become Internet “memes,” a pseudo-sociological term for jokey phenomena passed from person to person.
I think Richard Dawkins would disagree with this definition of a meme. And that’s hardly the only factual error here, either. The characterization of moot is off as well. The overall piece has a significant slant, too, as you’d expect from a FOX piece.
No, that’s not what surprised me. Rather, what surprised me was the realization that I didn’t mind the horrible journalism. Rather, I immediately IM’ed it to friends, and each responded with “LOL.” It’s funny to see a “serious” news outlet fuck up this badly, sure, but the nature of the inside jokes that permeate the internet hate machine ensure that anyone “outside the loop” becomes a part of the joke. I imagine, in the long run, this will lead to a lot of bad press — “journalists” will just get nothing but confirmation from talking to /b/tards or reading 4chan — so I’m not really sure how to feel about this. I’d just never sat and thought about it before.
I don’t dare suggest that we become more serious or organized. In fact, Anonymous would never stand for such silliness. I don’t even know if it’s really a problem we need to worry about. At the very least, we’re guranteed further entertainment.
