I got curious and found something interesting. This Vyshali Manivannan is either one of us or has a very sharp eye. Almost all of his scholarly articles (scholar.google.co.jp/citations?user=xESJHQ4AAAAJ) are on imageboard culture.
One from 2012 caught my eye, in which he explains imageboard and anonymous culture as being "oral" in nature, and memeticism as being a group actvity we create by shared interaction (what today we understand as the underpinnings of meme magic):
archive.fo/iKmU3
enculturation.camden.rutgers.edu/attaining-the-ninth-square
>Simultaneously, the Slowpoke-Geass instantiation attests to a return to orality as a mode of memory preservation in a transient digital environment without an archive. Taken together, these case studies illustrate the destabilizing ontological encounters typical to 4chan and the cybertextual practices required to productively engage with the site.
>These discursive practices must be enacted simultaneously through use of multiple tabs, frequent refreshing, and individual conservation in order to sustain an archive and manufacture institutional memory.
>This interaction transpires largely around trolling and memetic activity. It also occurs around the negotiation between ludus—rule-governed systems with a predesigned goal, ending with a clear triumph or defeat—and paidia, objectiveless, freeform, explorative play founded on the pleasure of the player’s mental and physical exertions (Frasca). This lusory behavior galvanizes permutative, combinatorial, and transformative discursive play. 4chan’s cybertextual and lusory qualities are thus imbricated in its production and preservation of institutional memory in a uniquely transient setting. Users’ ontological encounters with synchronicity, anonymity, and ephemerality engender distinct discursive processes that lay down principles for future communal practices and archive maintenance.
I find this ludis/padia terminology interesting.
Here's an interesting prescient passage:
>4chan’s continual and anti-systematic contingency is unpredictable and destabilizing. According to Knuttila, contingency is created through moderators’ site modifications and additionally self-generated by 4channers, who respond subversively through ludic memetic incorporation—“gaming the system”—using hacks or unofficial script alterations to reclaim 4chan’s interfaces, including ASCII modifications to usernames,11 :stopmusic: and similar functions, and digital steganography (Knuttila).
>Even accountability measures such as the recently instated ID tags on Holla Forums,12 intended to undermine 4chan’s intrinsic subjectivity, actually further cybertextual reading processes. The tags are only useful when users expend effort to correlate tags to posts, usually to identify trolls using the multiple-use, shared Anonymous identity for deceptive, sock-puppet purposes.
>Knuttila determines that the convergence of contingency and alterity radicalizes 4chan’s culture as one of automatic subversion and dissent via flaming, trolling, or mimetic attack. Because of this, he suggests that contingency is an embedded element of automatic dissent and that, within this culture, nothing is sacred, everything may be criticized, and anything remotely hierarchical or authoritative will be subverted (Knuttila).
"within this culture, nothing is sacred, everything may be criticized, and anything remotely hierarchical or authoritative will be subverted"
The real interest of this article is the formation of "institutional memory" and how it affects our culture's ability to respond to external threats. Our enemies, if they understand it, may use this to long-term erode us with more effect than simple shilling. We, on the other hand, may deliberately subsume this knowledge and strengthen our own oral traditions.