The Internet: A masquerade ball where everyone is invited.

Information... creation... produsage...socialising... all great commodities offered by the Internet. And ‘as we become more aware of how to use the available technology properly and deliberately... we learn also how to locate interesting and relevant information to share with others’ (Bruns 2008, week 6). This technoculture trend, defined as, ‘the process of focusing on a particular point and sharing these with others in an online community’ (Bruns 2008, week 6) is just another internet platform that is able to ‘transcend the limitations of physical space... finding others that are like minded and engage with them online for a very long time’ (Bruns 2008, week 6). But in the glory of these capabilities is the ability to bypass all limitations placed on anything a good thing. I mean think about it, the internet is a platform where who, what, when, where and why all become irrelevant. Every man is Hugh Grant, every woman Cameron Diaz.

I mentioned in the related article, Online Communities: Predator Paradise, a comment made by Dr. Axel Bruns. He states in a lecture given to his Virutal Cultures class that in an online community, ‘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 is an interesting statement outlining the concern surrounding the ‘anonymity’ of online users. Now I am not just taking about what someone looks like, or where they work during the day. The internet provides complete security for those who can online, pretend to be anyone they want to.

A scary concept, but as always, it doesn’t end there…

Once you have one of these online communities. What happens then? Who governs it for example? Does anyone tell you who to allow in and how many… how often… how you communicate or what you communicate about? For each little group that forms across the internet, does anyone have control? And this is my next point.

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’? Our online environment has numerous sites that ‘support causes that we might generally see as socially distruptive; as problematic. They are online communities that work perfectly well as online communities in their own right, but ultimately support extremist political views, or ideas that are seen as outdated or no longer acceptable’ (Bruns 2008, week 6).

With this in mind, is it really so great that we can be anyone we want to? Is the freedom an overweight 40 something man gets from anonymous blogging truly worth the sacrifices of knowledge we are making? 'Anonymity can be used to protect a criminal performing many different crimes, distribution of child pornography, illegal threats, racial agitation, fraud, intentional damage such as distribution of computer viruses, etc. Who would be accountable, how can you jail a website full of words?' (Palme & Berlund 2007, & Rogers 2005)

For a closer look at the pro's and con's of online anonymity click here, for the related article, Online Communities: Predators Paradise click here.

Blessed Blogging
Cheers gemini21