September 14th, 2009

Filed under:
Media
11 Comments »

A Proclivity for Anonymity

Over the past week, we’ve been teaching a series of workshops in the Interior. We had a couple of media people in our sessions–one editor of a small town newspaper, and one veteran TV and radio producer. Both of them spoke about how they disliked the web’s capacity for anonymous comment.

Kirk makes three media people concerned about this issue:

For some reason, anonymity is acceptable — not as the justifiable shield for those who fear retribution if identified, but as a shield for those with other kinds of fears, motives or tendencies. Somewhere early in the game it became a rule instead of an exception to adopt a nickname and speak through it.

The result breaks what we were all taught rightly in school: That part of the bargain in speaking freely is the responsibility to stand up and be counted, and that part of the bargain in being criticized is to at least know who is attacking.

I’ve heard precisely the same concern from other newspaper folks in the past. This shouldn’t be surprising, for a couple of reasons.

First, when a newspaper is going to print a letter to the editor, they typically require (or at least request) validating details like an address or phone number. Second, I’m sure that most reporters have, at one point or another, been the subject of venomous, anonymous criticism. This might encourage some pretty black and white views about online identity.

Kirk is clearly a web-savvy guy, a Level 12 Web Citizen, so I don’t want to lump him in with the other media people to whom I’m referring.

We Trust the People We Know

However, I do want to extend a theory about the other complainants. They were all over forty, making them, in the parlance of demographers, digital immigrants. They never grew up crafting their one or more identities on the web.

They may not, for example, fully grasp that one can be accountable, creditable and incognito online. Over the last decade I’ve come to know and trust several online acquaintances despite never having known their full or real name. If they had, they’d know that there’s no equivalent of “getting their address and phone number” online, and that identities are fluidly built and demolished based on online activity.

I’m not making an argument for unfettered, anonymous comments in online spaces like a newspaper’s website. Mostly, I’m trying to encourage people to think of online identity as a continuum, not an on-off switch. And to point out that as the web gets more social, anonymity becomes less and less effective as a tactic. We trust the people we know, after all.

Tags: , ,

Comments: 11 Responses so far

Derek K. Miller
September 14th, 2009
8:21 am

Also, once you’ve been online for a long time, you learn it’s best to ignore anonymous (or non-anonymous) trolls.

[Reply]

JohnB
September 14th, 2009
9:15 am

You wrote “They were all over forty, making them, in the parlance of demographers, digital immigrants. They never grew up crafting their one or more identities on the web.”

What utter twaddle. I’m old enough to be your father and you’d never guess how many identities I have on the net. Two are open and easily traceable back to me and, while using those identities, I have made some trenchant and, occasionally, provocative statements. One of the others has been recognized as a useful authority on a somewhat arcane piece of software. The others are maintained (some actively, some “not so much”) and I have taken care that they cannot easily be traced back to me … thank heaven for open wifi routers, libraries, and internet cafes.

[Reply]

darren Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 9:51 am

I didn’t say “all people over forty never grew up crafting their one or more identities on the web”. I said they, “the other complainants”, didn’t.

I obviously know a number of older people who have spent a long time online and therefore have multiple online identities.

That said, the vast majority of people over forty haven’t had this experience. You are the exception, not the rule.

[Reply]

Andrew Ferguson Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 10:07 am

I agree with darren’s reply to you below/above this comment, but you are awesome for using the word ‘twaddle’

[Reply]

Andrew Ferguson
September 14th, 2009
10:06 am

Here’s a somewhat relevant reddit thread to this idea of online anonymity that you might find interesting;

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/9k95o/reddit_what_is_the_worst_that_would_happen_if/

[Reply]

darren Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 10:41 am

Thanks for that–I glanced at that thread earlier, but haven’t read through it.

[Reply]

JohnB
September 14th, 2009
10:46 am

@Andrew .. yes, read that earlier today … an unexpected juxtaposition. (I am far too addicted to Reddit.)

@Darren … ok, then, what you wrote was “[The other complainants] were all over 40… They may not, for example, fully grasp…”

My original observation still holds: twaddle (especially when I include your “may not” timidity). I’m sure that if you had empiricle evidence supported by a reasonable and well-formed experiment then you would have cited it. Until then, “I want to extend a theory about bloggers under forty, making them in demographic terms digital natives. They believe they alone are dexterous enough to craft one or more identities on the intertubes. Their conceit is that they — and they almost alone — fully grasp that one can be accountable, creditable and incognito online. To help them understand the foolishness of their not yet fully formed intellectual maturity, I would refer them to the phrase “nom de plume”. I guess, to put things into perspective for the under-40s, everything old is new again.

[Reply]

darren Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 11:27 am

Surely you accept as fact the following:

* There are more young people on the web than older people. Here are some stats to support that. I’ll provide others as needed.

* That popular sites that require identity to participate–MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube–have been adopted far more by those under 40. Here are some stats on that.

That last link I cited says:

“19 percent of those aged 45 to 54; 10 percent of those aged 55 to 64 and just seven percent of those aged 65 and older [have joined a social network].”

I think we can assume that the majority of people joining a social network (of any age) only use one identity. So, we’re talking about a fraction of 10% to 19% of the population.

So, what, precisely, is ‘twaddle’?

[Reply]

JohnB Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 4:24 pm

Well … as you correctly and accurately point out: young people are joining the “identity to participate” sites. With how many identities? If we accept that the general answer (as you say — and I agree) is *generally* one then we have a non-sequiteur: your accurate statement is neither-here-nor-there when it comes to your statement “They [digital immigrants] may not, for example, fully grasp that one can be accountable, creditable and incognito online” — particularly when you drop in “may”.

As a purely speculative statement, I could posit that digital immigrants may not have as many online identities as digital natives (which may or may not be true — I have no idea) but it’s irrelevant: it has no bearing on whether a person with (as opposed to a person without) multiple online persona believes or disbelieves that “one can be accountable, creditable and incognito online.”

And, yes, there are more young people on the web than older people. This is hardly surprising … there are more of the younger cohort. Again, it is an interesting (well, not to me since it is intuitively obvious but it is nice to see it supported by some empirical evidence) but irrelevant: what does the number of young or old people on the web have to do with your initial point?

I don’t want to bore the others here by belabouring the issue but I have enjoyed (as I have done in the past) the repartee. I just wish I’d done it using one of my other identities.

[Reply]

darren Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 6:59 pm

We disagree. I think there’s a strong correlation between having crafted an identity online, and understanding how identity works on the web.

In my experience, the people most skeptical about the veracity or validity of online content and interaction are those who don’t participate in it. This is a pretty common pattern in human behaviour–we tend to distrust that which we haven’t experienced.

Your statement “there are more young people on the web than older people. This is hardly surprising … there are more of the younger cohort” is irrelevant, as I was pointing out percentages of a given cohort, not raw numbers. To quote a larger chunk from the article:

Seventy-five percent of online Americans aged 18 to 24 years old belong to a social network; 57 percent of those aged 25 to 34; 30 percent of those aged 35 to 44; 19 percent of those aged 45 to 54; 10 percent of those aged 55 to 64 and just seven percent of those aged 65 and older.

(Your statement is also empirically wrong, at least when it comes to Canada. According to Stats Canada, there are roughly the same number of people over 40 as under 40.)

Heck, as Stats Canada indicates, “Canadians between the ages of 18 and 44 (85%) were over one and a half times more likely to use the Internet than those 45 years of age and older (50%).”

Again, I’d argue that experience–particularly in something as nuanced as building identity online–is important to understanding. The vast majority of older people apparently lack this experience, so they’re much likelier to lack an understanding as well.

If you think there’s little or no correlation between experience and understanding, fair enough–that seems to be our essential disagreement.

Derek K. Miller
September 14th, 2009
12:53 pm

All generalizations (or stereotypes) have exceptions. I too am a digital immigrant, sort of–I’m 40. But I was lucky enough to start using computers as a child, since my dad brought me along to his FORTRAN programming classes in the ’70s. Many of my contemporaries got into it a little later. Yet I don’t think that’s quite the main thing.

But I think Darren’s point could be stated with a different analogy. Most of us come to love music in our teens, when we first get into it independently, and obsess about it, and develop our loves and tastes. However, research shows that it’s very difficult to come to appreciate a musical style that emerges later in your life. (Hence why I’ll always listen to hip-hop as an outsider.)

I think a Net-centred sense of privacy and anonymity is like that too. In general, if you’re immersed in it and develop it as a teenager, it feels native. But if it comes upon you when you’re older, it feels unfamiliar, and maybe always will.

And even though I was dealing with online anonymity and accountability at age 13, that was just the beginning, and there weren’t nearly as many people online then. So I never got into having several mutable identities. I’m still more comfortable just being myself out here — I don’t have any alternate IDs out there, and I rarely comment anonymously.

But I expect my kids will do that without any cognitive dissonance at all.

True, there are 60-year-olds who love hip-hop, just as there are net natives like JohnB who got into this stuff well past their teens. But they’re not all that common among their cohort. Darren’s newspaper complainants are, it seems, among the majority.

[Reply]

Add a comment