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Boxxy has divided opinion on 4chan, between those who greatly like and those who greatly dislike her, and this was the cause of the DDOS attack, with attitudes ranging from love to hate.[1][2] A large number of parodies, spoofs and spinoffs relating to Boxxy were also created by YouTube users during the period of Boxxy's fame.[2] Boxxy also led to notable speculation and reflection over the very nature of internet memes, why they occur, why they exist, and how they will be seen in the future, especially given the fact that they make their subjects famous for being famous.[1][6] The "Boxxy" internet meme has been compared to rickrolling[1] by The Guardian technology correspondent Bobbie Johnson.

OK, yes, the whole story is extremely convoluted. But it's the sort of thing that I saw in evidence at ROFLCon earlier this year: somebody who is entirely unknown can get picked up for basically doing nothing, but doing it in public. So when our future digital archaeologists start looking back at our actions, they'll come across Boxxy and look confused. How on earth do you relate that story in a way that makes sense in 100 years, given that it makes basically no sense right now? That's partly what I love about the internet - and partly what makes my brain hurt.

candleja 20 Jan 09, 6:48am posting about a site that shouldn't be talked about, much less visited, is unwise enough. gaining recognition as the person who's talking about it just doesn't make sense to me. plus the article itself is about some teen nobody, hardly worth putting yourself under that kind of scrutinyeven FOX news had more sense, and we all know how irresponsible their journalism is.this entry should probably be amended in some way, to protect the site, the poster, and the general population from exposure to one of the "darker corners of the internet." there's a reason people don't encourage others to walk down dark alleys in a bad part of town

the majority of people posting about boxxy were neither, they were people who didnt care less either way but decided to troll the boxxy haters by posting boxxy pictures of bawksey everywhere. they did it for the lulz

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@dvdhldnPerhaps I've got too much time on my hands, but I wrote about this because I find memes fascinating, and the idea of being internet famous is really intriguing. Add that to the violent, misogynistic tendencies of /b/ and the ability of the crowd to bully someone for basically nothing... this is - if we let it happen - the future of the internet.

Just looked up Anonymous on Wikipedia. Their 'demotivational logo' has the catchphrase 'Because none of us are as cruel as all of us'.What an incredible and disturbing concept - frightening because it is both barbaric and intelligent. Fodder for a Neal Stephenson novel, but in the real world. Anybody with an ounce of humanity would think these fascinating aspects of networked society very worthy of discussion.

I just lost the game. Boxxy isn't a meme, AT ALL. EFG is a meme. Boxxy = NOT.The old Anons will let this pass, new ones will get bored and eventually boxxy will be forgotten

Political life has become anonymous, incomprehensible and anomic to broad strata of the population

All the major public institutions of modern society have become "abstract."

Because of the religious crisis in modern society, social "homelessness" has become metaphysical--that is, it has become "homelessness" in the cosmos.

Modernity has accomplished many far-reaching transformations, but it has not fundamentally changed the finitude, fragility and mortality of the human condition. What it has accomplished is to seriously weaken those definitions of reality that previously made that human condition easier to bear. This has produced an anguish all its own, and one that we are inclined to think adds additional urgency and weight to the other discontents we have mentioned.

In the private sphere, "repressed" irrational impulses are allowed to come to the fore. A specific private identity provides shelter from the threats of anonymity. The transparency of the private world makes the opacity of the public one tolerable.

A limited number of highly significant relationships, most of them chosen voluntarily by the individual, provide the emotional resources for coping with the multi-relational reality "outside."

The most fundamental function of institutions is probably to protect the individual from having to make too many choices.

Human beings are not capable of tolerating the continuous uncertainty (or, if you will, freedom) of existing without institutional supports.

In their private lives individuals keep on constructing and reconstructing refuges that they experience as "home." But, over and over again, the cold winds of "homelessness" threaten these fragile constructions. It would be an overstatement to say that the "solution" of the private sphere is a failure; there are too many individual successes. But it is always very precarious.

Peter Marsden found the number of people with whom individuals “can discuss important matters” numbers only 3 for Americans[3]. In a subsequent survey, researchers found that this number has dropped slightly over the past 10 years[4], causing some alarm in the press, but without sufficient explanation[5].

Killworth, et al. found using this technique and others that the number of people a person will know in their lifetime ranges somewhere between 300 and 3000[1]. On Facebook, the average number of friends that a person has is currently 120[2]. Given that Facebook has only been around for 5 years, that not everyone uses it, and that the not every acquaintance has found each other, this number seems reasonable for an average user.

We were asked a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks?

Second, the main instantiation of educational activity in SL seems to be the recreation of the classroom in virtual space.

Third, efforts to introduce games and problem-based instruction as educational strategies have focused on adding a “game layer” on top of the SL environment rather than using the environment itself as a game.

I’ll be anxious to see how long it takes the educational community to realize that SL affords capabilities that transcend and exceed the capabilities of the classroom.

Fourth, my sense is that educators are generally tourists — outsiders looking in, just visiting — in the environment.

Few hold jobs. Comparatively few even “get off the island.” This is especially true of those educators who participate through the auspices of a private island. They’re very busy controlling the environment to suit their own purposes without really taking the time to understand the culture and environment. It’s no wonder they’re unable to recognized the inherent value of the space.

Fifth, everybody is interested in the space as an educational environment and almost nobody is looking at it as a learning environment.

They still think that there’s a direct correlation between teaching and learning in RL as well. That bias has been brought in world.

Conclusion: Teachers want to use the space. Most of them want to use it for the wrong reasons. Many don’t have a clue what it means to be “in the world” in any real sense, instead focusing on imposing RL constraints on SL constructs — even when those constraints are irrelevant.

So much of what we take for granted as part of daily life online, from the BIND software that makes domain names work, to the Apache webserver that powers a sizable chunk of the world's websites, to the cheap Linux servers that Google stacks into its global datacloud, was created by volunteers who gave their creations away to make possible something larger−the Web as we know it.

Is it possible to understand exactly what it is about the web that makes Wikipedia, Linux, FightAIDS@Home, the Gutenberg Project and Creative Commons possible? And if so, can this theoretical knowledge be put to practical use?

"We must now turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality."

We must develop a participative pedagogy, assisted by digital media and networked publics, that focuses on catalyzing, inspiring, nourishing, facilitating, and guiding literacies essential to individual and collective life.

to humanize the use of instruments that might otherwise enable commodification, mechanization and dehumanization

By literacy, I mean, following on Neil Postman and others, the set of skills that enable individuals to encode and decode knowledge and power via speech, writing, printing and collective action, and which, when learned, introduce the individual to a community.

Printing did not cause democracy or science, but literate populations, enabled by the printing press, devised systems for citizen governance and collective knowledge creation. The Internet did not cause open source production, Wikipedia or emergent collective responses to natural disasters, but it made it possible for people to act together in new ways, with people they weren't able to organize action with before, in places and at paces for which collective action had never been possible.

If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

Like the early days of print, radio, and television, the present structure of the participatory media regime−the political, economic, social and cultural institutions that constrain and empower the way the new medium can be used, and which impose structures on flows of information and capital−is still unsettled. As legislative and regulatory battles, business competition, and social institutions vie to control the new regime, a potentially decisive and presently unknown variable is the degree and kind of public participation. Because the unique power of the new media regime is precisely its participatory potential, the number of people who participate in using it during its formative years, and the skill with which they attempt to take advantage of this potential, is particularly salient.

Mobility, like frequent re-potting of plants, tends to disrupt root systems, and it takes time for an uprooted individual to put down new roots. It seems plausible that the automobile, suburbanization, and the movement to the Sun Belt have reduced the social rootedness of the average American,

It seems highly plausible that this social revolution should have reduced the time and energy available for building social capital.

These new mass-membership organizations are plainly of great political importance.

the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter.

tertiary associations