Reading Response September 5th James Brothers
Summary
The paper “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” begins by waxing very philosophical, mostly on whether or not you are you, or if by having multiple online personas you can become something different. The paper is primarily a study into ‘Usenets’ and why or how people use them, and specifically how identify plays a role in their use or communities. The paper then dives into just how you can use various clues to help identify people based on what they say online, and to see if it lends them a measure of credibility. A user who has an obviously free email may be suspect, while someone who has a domain belonging to their business is much more likely to be asking questions or qualified to be answering questions related to their business. Other ways to identify someone can also be their style of writing, the words they use, or the content of their message. Someone talking about their fish hobby, who writes both well and eloquently, is probably not a 9-year-old who got his parent’s computer to mess with people on the internet. However, deception is rife on the internet, as many of us know. The paper talks about various forms of online deception and its uses, many of which are a part of our common knowledge or vernacular today (Trolling for example).
Reflection
It is interesting that Identity plays an inherent role in whether or not we believe things people say or write. The article mentions that articles from the Wall Street Journal are seen as inherently more believable than a tabloid. That said, its something we don’t often give much thought to. How many pictures of “facts” online have you seen and believed? How many “quotes” do you see or hear on a regular basis? We give incredible scrutiny to these aspects in some cases, but not in others. It is perhaps telling that I already recognize and understand a fair amount of what the paper is talking about, as these issues have become a regular part of much of what we do on computers. Trolling, the assumption that I should take everything online with a grain of salt, etc. These are all things I understand and unconsciously do on a daily basis. There are extremely few things I look at online and assume they’re true, I suppose mostly online profiles which involve detailed storied pasts and a large number of pictures. Even so, people have been faking things like Facebook profiles for quite some time. Some form of easy identification (such as Twitter’s verified accounts) is important these days.
Questions
-What “signals” (assessment or conventional) do you see or use in everyday social media?
-What information could we glean from an analysis of various social medias’s writing styles? Moreover, what does your say about you?
-Have new forms of deception arisen since this paper was written, or what new forms of online identity deception exist now?
-Have any of you ever had issues with deception in online media? What did you do after you realized this? What could you do again in the future to combat it?
