The Internet: A Masquerade Ball and everyone is invited - comment

My interest in creating an online anonymity blog arose from the relationship i drew between it and online predators. As stated in my blog, ‘Online Communities: Predator Paradise’, ‘many young people are being subject to, or at least exposed to dangerous and inappropriate experiences on and through the internet’ (Youth Internet Safety Survey 2001). What the rest of that quote stated was, ‘The offenders and their offences are so diverse and their anonymity is crippling’ (Youth Internet Safety Survey 2001). This idea of anonymity in online communities triggered my desire to research the issue further.

What i found in researching this issue was that there was indeed a relationship between individuals being able to attain anonymity and the number of predators lurking across the internet. What was even more concerning was the stronger relationship between anonymity, online social networks and young people, thus the original article.

In continuing my research, i found that what we are confronting is not just an anonymous market, but a global online domain that people can pretend to be anyone they want to be. This was clarified in the quote by Bruns in which he states, ‘it doesn’t matter who i am, as far as physical appearance; it doesn’t matter where i am, as far as physical location... i can find others’ (Bruns 2008, week 6). This quote exemplifies the major problem associated with online anonymity; however the problem does not end there.

The article continues to comment on related issues such as online communities and the inability to control them. My favourite point here is that an echochamber could form anywhere inside an online community, decide on anything they wanted to and no-one would have any idea. This is stated in the quote, ‘So you have your little group that decides to lock down and cult up… you produce your little echochamber (Bruns 2008, week 6), and inside that echochamber your technoculture decides that they don’t like the colour blue anymore and they are going to eradicate the colour blue. How does anyone know? How would you stop them? Who is ‘them’?’ (The Internet blog 2008, 1). Just another way anonymity is eroding the positives created by online communities.

But there are a number of ways i could have improved my blog. The first would have been to develop my research further to include the protection anonymity provides to scam artists, online hackers breeching security and safety on including personal details online as far as identity fraud. This was not included, as i believed it deviated too far from the main idea of the blog, which was related directly to online anonymity affecting online communities.

In suggesting this, another way i could have improved it would have been to present a more balanced argument. I took a fairly strong stance against anonymity in online communities. Just as you could say the way anonymity removes the social and peer pressures of society is a good thing; i stated that for the same reasons and more, anonymity is bad.