Bernstein, Michael S., Monroy-Hernandez, Andres. Harry, Drew. Andre, Paul. Panovich, Katrina. Vargas, Greg. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity
and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”
Donath, Judith S. “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.” Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community, smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html.
Summary
The study that is outlined in “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” illustrates differences in identity within online communities. The researchers found that people identify themselves with account ID, and individual voice. Most of the time people are truthful about who they are online, but there are some exceptions. Trolls, impersonators, identity concealers, and catfish all lie about their identities on the internet.
The paper “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Emphemerality in a Large Online Community” discusses the often ambiguous and anonymous users of the website 4chan and how their culture shapes the whole of the internet. The researchers studied data scraped from the “random” forum board on 4chan, one of its most popular pages, and found that since “random” is constantly being updated and old posts are constantly being deleted, that it cultivates a quickly changing community that is constantly experimenting with new ideas and memes. Other sites such as twitter and facebook lack anonymity, which can lead to a different type of internet community with different social interactions. They found that 90% of all posts in this forum were completely anonymous, leading to a unique culture that permeates throughout the internet.
Reflection
The first paper intrigued me mostly because I really love the MTV show “Catfish” which is an exploration into people’s online romances and how usually one person in the relationship is lying about their identity for one reason or another. This is interesting in how it relates to the above study because it happens almost everywhere on the internet, Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, etc. even though most of the users of these websites do not lie about who they are.
I was initially interested by the second paper because I barely knew anything about 4chan. I knew that it has a lot of outside influence on internet culture in general, and now that I’ve read this research I know part of the reason why 4chan has so much influence on internet culture in general.
I would like to know how these findings would change if the research were to be up to date. I know that 4chan had a lot of influence on the internet when this study took place, in 2010, but it could be different now that the internet landscape has changed in the past 7 years. As for the other paper, I think the findings are still accurate in the current internet landscape.
Questions
- How has deception on the internet changed since this paper was written?
- I know it is a lot harder to impersonate people on the internet nowadays
- Do other websites have some of the same characteristics of 4chan?
- How has anonymity changed since this paper was written?
- Has writing style and voice changed since these papers were written?
- Are there any websites that have consequences for lying about identity?
- What websites are easiest to fake an identity on? Which are hardest?
