what happens to identity play in an era of Facebook’s “authentic” identity? Here’s a case study from 2008, in which the author was ejected from Facebook because she wasn’t using her “real” name.
"Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn’t be caught."
—
Online, Anonymity Breeds Contempt. A historical perspective on anonymity from an article on internet trolling on NYT.com in 2010.
BUT! Anonymity isn’t the only issue. Here’s a report from The Guardian in 2007 including this quote from Dr Chris Fullwood, “internet researcher”:
Removing anonymity may have some small effect, but not a massive one. This is because a number of factors contribute towards what psychologists call online disinhibition. Removing one of them - the anonymity - and not removing any of the others means it will probably still occur as people remain invisible and so can disassociate their online from their offline persona.
(note many of the links in the guardian article are broken/old!)
two interesting things in this article from Poynter:
1) “real identity” is described as “verified by Facebook”
2) “many news sites have been using [Facebook’s plugin] to verify identity… and raise the level of discourse”
I’m ISO any research that correlates “raising the level of discourse” and “real identity”. It’s for #hate.
HT the magnificent Meg Pickard.
"In this work we examine the complex interplay between the needs and desires of news commenters with the functioning of different journalistic approaches toward managing comment quality."
—
From:
Diakopolous, N. & Naaman, M. (2011). Towards quality discourse in online news comments. Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperarative Work. New York, NY.
A few notes/quotes from the article:
Early work in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has documented how a lack of status cues and social context can introduce unwelcome low-quality contributions into online communication systems. Quality in this context refers to a degree of excellence in communicating knowledge or intelligence and normatively includes notions of accuracy, reliability, validity, currency, relevancy, comprehensiveness, and clarity [30, 31]. In the realm of online comments low-quality contributions might include “flaming” and more impulsive remarks [14] and are often implicated with anonymity, with less anonymity linked to higher quality comments.
crowd-based moderation has been effective, but this relies on two things: 1) pervasive and consistent online identities and 2) a homogenous attitude about what’s “good” and what’s “bad” amongst community members.
"While online, some people self-disclose or act out more frequently or intensely than they would in person. This article explores six factors that interact with each other in creating this online disinhibition effect: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority. Personality variables also will influence the extent of this disinhibition. Rather than thinking of disinhibition as the revealing of an underlying “true self,” we can conceptualize it as a shift to a constellation within self-structure, involving clusters of affect and cognition that differ from the in-person constellation."
—
Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, Vol 7(3): 321-326.
Just the abstract. AKA GIFT.
Rachel Cooke and I debated the anonymity question for Comment is Free in The Observer in April 2010.
She: yes
…people are inclined to be a lot meaner when no one knows who they are.
…
As for the effect that this behaviour has on life in the real world – on our manners, on what remains of our sense of decency and propriety – it cannot, surely, be benign.
Me: no
Here’s a little secret that anyone who’s been involved with the internet for more than five minutes has known for decades: there is no such thing as anonymity online.
…
In time and with more contribution, people – now associated with their pseudonyms – accrue enough social capital to open up (or close down) opportunities for better access to things valued by the community.
etc.
Correction: hate
I wrote in my column about online hate, published on Sunday 12 December 2010, that Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo had conducted research that described how the context of anonymity was as important as the deindividuating effects of the anonymity itself. In fact, the authors of the study - Deindividuation and valence of cues: Effects on prosocial and antisocial behavior - were Robert Johnson & Leslie Downing. The article was published in JPSP in September 1979.
The argument I made using this evidence still stands.
Mea maxima culpa.
"Deindividuation theory is a social psychological account of the individual in the crowd. Deindividuation is a psychological state of decreased self-evaluation, causing anti-normative and disinhibited behavior. The impact of deindividuation theory in science and society (especially 20th century politics) make it one of social science’s more influential contributions. Deindividuation theory is rooted in some of the earliest social psychological theorizing, more than a century ago. It seeks to explain the apparent transformation of rational individuals into an unruly group or crowd. It posits that the group provides an environment in which the individual —submerged and anonymous — suffers from a loss of self-awareness (Zimbardo, 1969). Deindividuation hinders reflection about the consequences of actions, rendering social norms impotent while increasing suggestibility to random outside influences. The theory has been invoked to account for a range of phenomena such as collective behavior, behavior in online groups and in CMC, and the results of the classic Stanford Prison Experience. Despite its status and impact, empirical support for deindividuation theory is minimal. Recently, this lack of support has been attributed to the faulty assumption that crowds cause a loss of self. Instead, it has been proposed that deindividuation marks a transition from individual identity to social dimensions of the self. This transition to a social identity may increase responsiveness to social norms particular to the crowd, instead of decreasing responsiveness to generic social norms, as suggested by deindividuation theory."
— Deindividuation (by psychologist Tom Postmes, from University of Exeter)
"What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?"
— The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment (and of deindividuation/anonymity)
Penny Arcade (19 March 2004) on the effects of internet anonymity on normal people.
via @doriantaylor
