Summary
In the article “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community”, Judith Donath talks about how identity is crucial in how users communicate online and in the real world. By examining the Usenet environment, their study was able to determine how people were able to identify users through different means and how it still caused many issues. Issues that include things like trolling where users will make a fake account just to ruin a thread. There is also a chance of corrupt data and information being put out there because of people using deception. Now Usenet is able to use many things from the way people talk, their signatures, and their posts to track the user down and find their identity and see if they are a reliable source or not.
The article, “An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”, talks about a discussion board called “’/b/” at 4chan.org. This page allows users to post threads without creating an identity. This brings up a discussion of what difference it makes when people put a label to a post identifying it with a person or as anonymous. This article explains how the anonymous posts on the 4chan page brought it so many diverse threads that leads to a cultural influence. Compared to other major sites like Facebook and Twitter, 4chan creates more of a cultural influence in memes and viral posts because so many diverse people can post things and be seen without the worry of having that thread pointed back at them. This also is affected by the constant change in popularity of threads that keep changing every couple of minutes. In the end this article concludes the influence anonymity can bring out the most from people and be shared with a large audience to create cultural changes and influences.
Reflection
After reading these two articles, I got a better understanding of the online world by looking at how identity plays a role in how people communicate online. I took away the fact that identity can be a good thing and a bad thing when posting on a social networking site. It can allow people to post things and gain diversity in ideas and lead to cultural influence; however, it can also bring people to post useless things that can even hurt the spread of meaningful data. I think if there is a good way of monitoring the anonymity of users, it can be beneficial to the sharing of ideas and continue moving our culture.
Questions
- If there are new ways people are hiding their identities online, what other precautions can we make to limit the number of fake identities?
- What other things can we look at besides voice, language, etc. to identify a user?
- What are the negative influences anonymity brings?
- For example, the recent VT YikYak threat that put police on high alert.
- What makes people post more being anonymous than with an identity? Especially if their thread gets popular, they try to take credit for it afterwards.
