Remember the 90s when the everyone worried about how truthful the Internet is? From lonely hearts on chat rooms posing as the hotties they wished the were, to one-person shops referring to themselves as “we” on their About Us page, people took advantage of the early Web Invisibility Cloak to reinvent themselves. New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner nailed it in his 1993 cartoon: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
But now, 15 years on, an unexpected shift has happened. Thanks to photo sharing sites, forums, social media sites, and Google indexing every step you make on the web, it’s getting harder to fake it. Your online self is now a more permanent and visible version of your physical self. Your every online utterance, drunken party picture, and speeding ticket is now up there for all to see. You now have 2 reputations to manage: your physical self and your online self.
My friend Ed Kless recently referred me to this excellent article in the New York Times about this phenomenon. An excerpt:
Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.
“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you.”
I’ve been mulling this thought over for the past week, thinking about how little privacy we really have now. It’s interesting that the web has morphed from a D&D fantasy-scape to a gigantic reality show. In a way it’s good, because it forces you to be accountable for all your actions, which (hopefully) makes you act more responsibly, so as not to live with permanent cyber-embarrassment. On the other hand, it makes you wonder where (and if) there will ever be uncharted territory again. It’s human nature to want to escape, to clean your slate, to reinvent yourself. Is it even possible anymore?
Read the NY times article and tell me what you think. Is the web a better place than it was in the beginning?
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September 22nd, 2008 at 9:24 am
I have read some other stuff on this subject and my belief is that we never really had the anonymity we thought we did.
Cities gave us the illusion of privacy because of their size, but in reality we are connected with a similar number of people as when we lived in small communities. They only difference is that our connections are spread out more geographically.
Interesting stuff to think about.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:23 pm
That’s a good point. There probably has never really been nearly as much anonymity as we thought. My neighbors and I have talked about the need for “virtual privacy” when you live or work in close proximity with people. It’s very disconcerting to feel like people can see and hear everything you do.
I’ve had the weird experience of googling something (often a tech or design question), and finding my own post show up first in the search results. I’ve also had clients find posts of mine, months or years old, on design forums. The Internet’s memory is far better than my own brain’s.
I am constantly having to check myself not to say something too personal or obnoxious on Twitter, for fear of it coming back to bite me some day. In fact, I’ve posted my Twitter feed here on the sidebar of this blog to remind myself that it’s going there for everyone to see.
November 13th, 2008 at 1:44 am
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