Summary:
Identity and Deception in the Virtual community:
The paper talks about identity and how it plays an important role in human social interactions, such as providing many basic cues about personality and the role we play in society or helping both parties understand and evaluate an interaction. The paper then goes on to express how on the internet identity is often ambiguous or absent entirely and how this can provide deception in social interactions. Furthermore the paper discusses the concept that the physical world confines a person to one body and therefore one identity but virtual communities do not confine you to one body and therefore a user can assume multiple identities. The paper goes on to philosophically inquire about the relationship between the self and the body for a bit before returning to more practical issues that a lack of proved identity creates. Some examples given were when a high school student pretends to be an expert on viruses or when a fake virologist gives information on new AIDS treatments to people who believe him while the new treatments actually have no backing.
4chan and /b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community:
The paper states that researchers and practitioners often assume that data permanence and user identity are integral to a successful online social community, however 4chan remains successful without either. The paper researches how sites like 4chan can be successful while being anonymous and ephemeral and explores how users use 4chan and for what purpose. To o this they first decide to study just how anonymous and ephemeral 4chan is. The study for ephemerality finds that threads are only on the front page where they are most viewable for about 5 seconds, and the thread itself lasts for about 5 minutes on average. The study for anonymity find that over 90% of posts on 4chan are made by fully anonymous users. The paper then talks about the activity users partake in on 4chan and what percentage of all activity is taken by the following types: Themed, Sharing content, Question/advice, sharing personal information, discussion, request for item, request for action, meta and other.
Reflection:
Identity and Deception in the Virtual community:
The issue of identity and deception based on that identity is an already well-known issue as even in the real world and an individual needs to prove that they are who you say you are. For example, an individual needs a license to prove that you’re a qualified doctor, or a badge to prove they’re actually a police officer. Taking that issue to a virtual community only complicates it more as you can no longer even see if the person making the claim looks the part. Though identification should still be expected before accepting important information, such as in-depth medical advice. More interesting is the idea that one user can have multiple identities that they hop between. Unless the user is very obvious with their behavior it may be incredibly difficult to determine if you’re speaking with or reading a discussion between many people or just a few people.
4chan and /b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community:
The idea that a social community can exist while virtually no member of the community know who any of the other members are in the slightest is interesting. Ephemerality as brought up in the paper is interesting as well, though I feel it is not nearly as important as the anonymity for studying 4chan and similar sites for why they work. After all when anonymity is in place ephemerality is redundant, there’s little difference when the information cannot be attributed to specific individuals either way. Furthermore due to the nature of the internet, not much is really ephemeral. Anyone who wishes to can take a picture of one of 4chan’s ephemeral threads and the picture will not disappear when the thread does. The types of activity the paper categorized for 4chan are also interesting, particularly for how anonymity may play into those activities. For example, “sharing personal information” may be more popular when there’s no identity for that information to be assigned to.
Questions:
- What is a good method to finding out if multiple accounts have the same creator?
- Who is this 4chan?
- What are the pros and cons of having anonymity or having identity?
- How important is anonymity for the types of activity the paper categorized for users of 4chan?
- How important is ephemerality to these types of activity?
