Jaron Lanier warns of them, in a story by Ron Rosenbaum.
he [Lanier] singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.
Read the whole article. Some thoughts.
1. Lanier’s view that Google and other companies that aggregate user information (in his example, to train Google’translation algorithm) are taking unfair advantage of those users was not at all persuasive to me.
2. His concern about the down side of anonymity is one that I share.
3. Suppose we use the three-axis model to examine anonymity. For a conservative, the concern would be that anonymity would encourage man’s barbarous nature. Thus, Lanier’s argument should resonate well with conservatives. For a libertarian, anonymity represents a way to evade government control. Hence, along the freedom-coercion axis it is a plus. For a progressive, anonymity is good if it is used by the weak and bad if it is used by the strong. Note that in the story Lanier emphasizes different axes on different issues (that is by no means a bad thing).
4. Facebook cuts against the grain of anonymity on the Internet. I think that this is one of the most interesting and important aspects of Facebook, and I have not come across any commentary about it.
Re Facebook as a champion of anonymity; there was a Guardian article about that in April:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/19/online-identity-authenticity-anonymity
But comments on that article, either anonymous or otherwise, weren’t enabled 🙁
I always wonder about that decision-making process on the part of e.g. the NYT or Guardian: why are some articles commentable, and others not? And why can’t they append a note explaining that decision, a la “commenting on this article is not possible because we are understaffed / because the topic is too radioactive” etc…
Duh, I meant “Re Facebook as a FOE of anonymity”…
I agree that anonymity in web comments is a “poison seed” but it’s our current equilibrium. I have yet to figure out my axis, but I tried to buck the trend and use my full name in comments. But it proved a headache for me off the web. I like facebook because I know who I am sharing with, but it’s not really a platform for open debate. The people who run the blogs and other online debate forums could fix this problem and raise the level of discourse, in my opinion.
I saw somewhere that a German court had ordered Facebook to allow people to use aliases. So there is at least one political context (and “comment” if you will) on that Facebooks’ prior resistence to aliases.
There’s a related problem – no system can completely stop people from impersonating others. If we can’t stop people from having some success with passports and driver’s licenses, why do we think people won’t sometimes manage to spoof IDs on facebook (and elsewhere.)
Given that, a very healthy suspicion that any post by any poster may in fact be an impersonation must ALWAYS be at hand.
Huh, happened to read the same article yesterday. Some of his gripes make some sense, others not so much. He comes off as pretty hypocritical if he was part of the idiotic “information wants to be free” crowd and then makes an about-face only once the natural consequence happens, his musician friends not being able to make money off recording contracts anymore.
I think it’s a fair critique that google and other internet giants make money by aggregating small bits of value from all over the internet, what that nitwit Carr called digital sharecropping. For example, Amazon could give users who write a lot of reviews discounts in return, but they refuse to compensate in any way those who they’re gaining a lot of value from, in aggregate. Carr is a nitwit because the harm done to each of the creators is fairly small, so he’s just blowing things out of proportion by using an exaggerated term like that, but the fact remains that these companies are profiting off of the work of others. Not sure if that’s how google’s translation really works, but in that case, all you have to do is not put your translation up on the open web.
As for anonymity, what people are missing is the openness that it brings. People say what they really think when they think they’re hidden, which I value much more than I mind the possible bile that could come with it. The critics almost never talk about this great benefit, but then I guess most people don’t care what others really think.
I heard a great analogy by somebody online, that having your name go with you everywhere you post online would be like shouting your name and info out loud whenever you enter any room or go down the street in real life. The default is anonymity in the real world, people often forget that.
Facebook’s use of real names has been discussed to death, as Ben points out, but I find their commenting solution silly, for the reasons given. The real solution is to allow anonymity, but rather than trying to reuse the reputation associated with someone’s real name, allow the commenter to build up an electronic reputation with their nickname, one that is trackable and verifiable. Of course, the techies have been to dumb to build this yet.
Please distinguish anonymity from the use of aliases. The former means that someone drops a comment and you have no idea who it is. The latter means that someone drops a comment and you know it’s the same person who dropped 1000 other comments.
“Anon1023” is an anonymous handle. “Tom Cruise” is an alias. I think the latter example shows that aliases are not problematic if they are handled well.
My name is Keith Adams, and I’m an engineer at Facebook.
There’s been pretty extensive commentary on Facebook’s unusual take on Internet identity, though most of it has been in the navel-gazing valley tech blogosphere. One of the more thoughtful pieces, with lots of firsthand insight, was written by my former colleague Yishan Wong, on Quora:
http://www.quora.com/Why-has-there-been-an-outcry-against-real-names-on-Google+-but-not-on-Quora/answer/Yishan-Wong