the secret life of ‘anonymous’
Posted on 11. Aug, 2011 by Adrian in muse
words > CHUCK ROSS
Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, Marketing Director of Facebook, Mistress of the Universe said recently:
“I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. People behave a lot better when they have their real names down…I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.”
I’m not sure what Zuckerberg has against doors, but whatever.
The internet – and by that I mostly mean Facebook – thrives on secrecy and anonymity. As I write this there is about an 83% chance that my girlfriend is on her phone scrolling through Facebook photos of a person whose life she is interested in keeping tabs on – a fact I’d have a zero percent chance of getting her to admit.
Facebook and many online blogs and news websites would crumble if anonymity were completely snuffed out. The ‘commentariate’ – the cadre of office workers and otherwise idle individuals who spend time exchanging ideas on the internet – would dry up if their faces or their given names were attached to the random brain farts that they occasionally let rip. To borrow the phrase, Zuckerberg would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
But I sense a little hypocrisy in Zuckerberg’s stance. She and her brother seem to stop short of the transparent ideal. If Zuckerberg took her own words seriously, Facebook’s users would be able to use technology that bloggers and other websites use to track site activity. As of now, Facebook doesn’t allow users to track page clicks, profile visits, or picture views – though they could easily flip a switch somewhere in Silicon Valley and make it happen. Because if “Facebook stalkers,” like my girlfriend or me or anyone else who uses Facebook, were able to be tracked, we’d cease being stalkers – which means traffic would fall off a cliff. Most of us have a natural aversion to seeming as if we actually care what someone else is doing with their life. Facebook exists and thrives only because people can hide behind their anonymity. Take that away and Facebook might as well sell the site to the same guys who recently bought MySpace.
So why does Zuckerberg – along with others like Google CEO Eric Schmidt – think that online anonymity should be curtailed? Zuckerberg is mostly worried about cyber-bullying and harassment. The Google CEO has even gone as far as saying that online anonymity is “dangerous” and that the government should step in to fix the problem. Online bullying and harassment are serious issues, but it seems convenient that Zuckerberg’s activism (and Schmidt’s) fits nicely with her company’s business strategy of helping marketers monitor people’s online habits. Facebook and Google have monetized their ability to track our online behavior which they feed back to companies who try to customize their marketing efforts. The more information they have about each consumer, the more precise their market knowledge. If people remain anonymous online, these companies can’t match their online personas up with their wallets. And that’s bad for Zuckerberg. Big Brother where art thou!
Bullying and harassment are obviously not ideal, and they certainly pose a problem that our fledgling internet has not fully addressed. But it seems that requiring everyone to expose their true identities would only create more opportunity for real-world bullying and harassment. If a person (a non-bully) was forced to go by their true identity online then other people would be able to actually target that person; whereas before they’d only be targeting just another faceless commenter. This is another example of the law of unintended consequences.
Anonymity is good for other reasons, too. Uninhibited speech and dissent can actually increase transparency. Challenging the status quo is a valuable activity, but it is snuffed out too easily if anonymity is lost. Various industry, military, and government whistleblowers were able to speak truth to power only because their anonymity was ensured. And usually the most important investigative journalism requires anonymous sources who would be muffled – either occupationally or literally, in some cases – if they had to go on record with their testimony.
In less serious venues, online anonymity allows for more dynamic discourse. People who would be too worried to ruffle the feathers of polite society by speaking hard truth hide behind their goofy internet nicknames – or the ubiquitous ‘anonymous’ – in order to exercise the free-thinking philosophical part of their mind. Many conversations that would never take place in the tangible world take place only because anonymity is ensured.
Finally, it is true that a lot of people write a lot of stupid things on the internet, but it would be nice not to have to worry about momentary stupidity sitting in your virtual permanent file forever. We don’t monitor the stupid or even hurtful things that people say in their non-internet lives – should our homes, cars, and offices be set up with recording equipment for the sake of snuffing that out?
