DDMcD's "Anonymity" Posts
Listed below are some of my posts that address the topic of anonymity, usually in the context of people writing or commenting online without revealing their true identities.
Tolerance for anonymity, I believe, is one of the reasons that some online forums and networks can become toxic or full of misinformation.
I have no real data to support that. It is based instead on my belief that people might be less willing to be nasty or outright lie online were they to reveal their true identities.
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This is not intended as criticism of those who find Facebook useful for publishing and marketing. After all, “Some of my best friends use Facebook.”
I used to be amused at those who browse LinkedIn anonymously. After all, I thought, what good is online anonymity to a service that is promoting professional networking? The two seemed at odds with each other.
There’s no doubt in my mind the cloud-based services can help us deal with the major events, but I think we will have to wait a lot longer for the butterfly wings.
I recently had a discussion with Robyn Tippins on Google+. I know Robyn from our podcasting days and from Linkedin Bloggers. Robyn, who recently moved to Read Write Web to serve as Community Manager, had mentioned she was hoping it would be possible to schedule posts in advance on Google+:
In Whoops, I didn’t mean for you to read this Brian Solis explains Facebook’s new “frictionless sharing” model which gives people the ability, when they install a new Facebook app that makes such sharing possible, to decide whether or not they want their app-related behaviors to be automatically added to their Facebook timeline. This then makes it possible for Facebook followers to receive automatic notifications of these behaviors and provides advertisers with invaluable data on personal behavior and preferences.
I always thought when seeing the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind that the musical conversation between the alien Mothership and the humans was cut short when the aliens realized they were no longer playing with a human but with a computer program.
So how are we doing in terms of increasing public involvement in creating, assessing, and commenting on public policies?
I used to think that if you want to be taken seriously online, and if you want to actually participate in an ongoing dialog with a sponsor or other participants, you need to post using your own name and identity so that others know who you are.
In my daily perusal of my Megite news feed, I ran across these two articles: * Ask.com Unveils Search Privacy Tool: Users Control Their Search Data
* Scheme to Destroy Your Competition with RivalMap
Listing contents copyright (c) 2023 by Dennis D. McDonald. The image at the top of the page was generated by Bing’s Image Creator in response to the prompt, “online anonymity.”
