anonymity and masks
Masks are simple instruments that transport us into different worlds. They help us temporarily get away from ourselves and our societal burdens. They are like pre-historic versions of virtual-reality glasses, exploiting the already-existing self-deceptive powers of the human mind.
Modern societies no longer wear masks to get in contact with the tribal spirits, but they nevertheless engage in a similar practice within the ever-evolving and ever-present social texture of the internet.
Usernames and profile photos help us assume different personas and achieve what is called pseudo-anonymity. In fact, internet offers even more. Some sites let you go completely invisible and express yourself in various forms fully-anonymously. (Of course, such a disappearance act is not possible in the physical world, even if everyone wears the same exact mask.)
Pseudo-anonymity and full-anonymity lead to very different behavioural outcomes.
Say you enter a masquerade ball where everyone is wearing a different mask. Since people can be distinguished from each other, they bear a reputational risk, just as in the real world. The only difference is that this particular risk lasts a controllable period of time since you always have the option to leave the ball. Of course, as you spend more time inside mingling with others and building up a profile, you have less of an incentive to reset everything by leaving and coming back with a different mask.
Surprisingly, inside such a pseudo-anonymous environment, people not only behave well but also act more like themselves. This is a very deep insight about human nature. Just reflect on it for a while.
Pseudonymous participation in forums is different in several ways from anonymous participation. Disqus.com, a commenting platform used to handle discussions on more than 1 million websites, analyzed the quantity and quality of comments from anonymous, pseudonymous, and named individuals. They defined quality as the number of “likes” and/or replies each type of comment gathered, as opposed to the number of flags, spam markers, and deletes that commenter received. Anonymous users provided the lowest quality comments, but it was pseudonymous rather than named users who provided the highest quality comments. Overall 61 percent of the pseudonymous comments were seen as positive, whereas 51 percent of those from people using their real names and only 34 percent of the anonymous comments possessed the positive quality attributes.
- Evil by Design
Time seems to have a mystical effect on our relationship with society. Our real personality and expressed personality start to diverge the moment we start interacting with our new environment. It is as if we model the society in our minds and this model slowly takes over our relationship with the society and gradually causes us to become slaves of our own thoughts.
Our real face can be thought of as just another mask. Put in other words, once we wear a mask long enough, it literally becomes our face and the tragic cycle repeats itself: We once again desire to wear a mask to become our real selves.
In this sense, leaving and rejoining an online community can have a real therapeutic effect.
Unfortunately, in the real world, it is not possible to completely reset your already existing relationships. But what you can do is to leave your existing network entirely and try building a brand new one. (For instance, I have personally witnessed people reinventing themselves by moving abroad.)
Full anonymity can be outright dangerous. When we know that our mask is constantly changing or that we can not be seen at all, we do all sorts of weird, shameful stuff. (Is that why we invented God?) It is as if we lose our personality all together and return to this amorphous base human being.
For instance, in traffic, we can act like a maniac and suddenly cease to act like a maniac once we make an eye contact with the person we are quarrelling with.
In such instances, civilisation and its accompanying norms disappear along with us. We can harass, degrade, troll, even rape if given the opportunity. (Of course, in real life, we can not go invisible, but we can be in remote places where there are no gazers in sight.)
Summing up, although there is a subtle difference between wearing a mask and no mask, there is a huge difference between wearing a mask and being completely unidentifiable. One should keep this in mind while structuring online social environments.
