When I first started using computer networks as a medium of communication my feelings about the good things that would come from the possibility of anonymous posting was one of optimism. I expected that people would gleefully take to a sort of freedom as expressed in one reading of the old cartoon whose caption read "On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog".
I didn’t read the cartoon as a warning: you have no idea who wrote what you’re reading and they might have no credentials. I thought that when people posted their ideas anonymously, their ideas would be judged entirely on the merit of the ideas. People would stop discriminating on the basis of gender, race or qualifications. I felt that once everyone got together on one big Internet, we’d be able to sort out the problems facing humanity by rational discussion. We couldn’t do otherwise since we couldn’t see each other’s races or genders. We’d have no problem achieving world peace.
That was a while ago. I was young and just a tiny little bit naïve. Some problems with my vision of the future didn’t cross my mind. For example, it didn’t occur to me that religious discrimination would still be quite possible. As soon as people started talking about their religions people would be able to discriminate based on religion. The ability to be anonymous wouldn’t fix that. In fact, sometimes hiding behind the protection of anonymity allows people to be ruder than they would be otherwise.
In the previous paragraph I used the phrase "didn’t cross my mind." I don’t think that lack of imagination was all that was wrong with my thinking. If someone had shown me Panacea or Panopticon? The Hidden Power in Computer-Mediated Communication, I think that I would have considered it a simple choice and expected that people would choose to make use the Internet as a panacea. I was fantastically optimistic about the world. I wasn’t alone. The cartoon I mentioned above has inspired people to impressive achievements.
With the wisdom of hindsight, I can see that I was being simple minded. The situation isn’t as straightforward as taking a dichotomy in the title of a paper as a complete description of what might be possible. It certainly isn’t the case that people stupidly made a bad choice. There’s a whole lot more to it than that.
Once again, I’d like to return to the case of the dog in the cartoon. One reading of the cartoon (and indeed the one that I made at the time) is that dog is pleased that nobody knows that he or she is a dog; the dog will be taken seriously instead of being treated like a … well … a dog. But, what if being a dog is important to the self-identity of the dog? It should be. My gender is important to me. Sometimes. It isn’t always at the front of my mind. The same is true for my age, my race and my religious attitudes. All of these things influence how I’m treated by the people around me and in turn how I expect to be treated.
I’m not saying that these things about me are good or bad. I am saying that gender, age, religion, race and other things about a person matter. They matter our self-identities. Hiding them takes something away from us. We have a splendid illustrative example of this in a post made by a member of our class. The post has real positive emotional content and the content is inextricably linked to the poster’s place of origin.
A lot of time has passed since I first started using computer networks. I now know that the Internet won’t solve the problems of the world in any simple way. I am still optimistic though. I think that people can learn to use the Internet thoughtfully and that that will help humanity to make some progress.
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