The main topic of discussion for todays’ reflection was Identity, deception and anonymity. The papers assigned for this assignment are
- Donath, Judith S. (1999)- “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. Book chapter from “Communities in Cyberspace” (29-59).
- Bernstein, Michael S. et al. (2011) – “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”. Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (50-57).
Summary.
The first paper by Judith S. Donath talk about the identity and the deception that is prevalent in the online community. For example, a person can claim to be an expert of a matter or can falsely embody someone else so on and so forth. The paper mainly focuses on the Usenet newsgroup which is predominantly a non-fiction based virtual community. It mainly discusses how reliability of a post is closely based on the writers’ credibility. It talks about how the information from a post e.g., the writers’ email address, the language and tone of the post itself, the signature, can be used to detect various attributes about the author of the post. Attributes like the location, organization, gender etc. are some which may be detected. Judith also describes how trolls are common in those chat forums and that often it has even led to contacting the system administrators of these offenders to act against them.
The second paper focuses mainly on the anonymity and the ephemerality of posts in the large online community of 4chan, and its most popular board named /b/. The authors conduct two kinds of study to test the ephemerality of the posts itself and the identity and anonymity of user to understand its effects. It gives an idea about what kind of content the community wants, which results in the post to have a relatively longer life and even been re-posted later on. The concept of “bumping” and “sage” is described which gives the user control over the ephemerality of the posts. It was found that over 90 percent of the posts on /b/ was completely anonymous. Email signatures were also uncommon with 98.3% of posts not containing an email. It was also found that only 0.05% of posts had tripcodes and pseudo names.
Reflection.
The first paper gives an idea about how identity plays an important role in the virtual community. It also points out ways by which one can somewhat get an essence of the post is trustworthy or just a “troll”. One thing that I could relate to right away is how I tend to rely on articles and posts in social forums like Quora, Twitter, mac-forums or Stack Overflow is quite similar. I have noticed that I tend to look at the persons’ name, the email and his description. The blue tick of twitter, or the name and description of Quora, the tag attached to the author in mac-forums (Administrator, Moderator, Member, Premium-Member etc.) and the number of up votes (or the green tick) in a stack overflow post makes me decide if I want to believe or follow the particular article. It is true that sometimes it turns out to be dubious and I am completely directed in the wrong route which leads me to believe that trusting such users, based on only the signatures and other attributes is erroneous.
The second paper mainly highlights how common anonymous posting is in the realm of the virtual world. There is a need for anonymous posting where people seeking help or advice without giving up the identity can benefit from this. This helps in keeping certain sensitive matters private. Nonetheless, on the other hand, in absence of any form of authentication, a suspicious individual can exploit the system due to the lack of accountability. It was pointed out by the author that /b/ is “crude” with contents often being “intentionally offensive”. because of its anonymous nature. The main point that stands out to me here is, when it comes to valuable information, then user identification is of greater importance and the worth of the information is related to the credibility of the one posting it.
The question of ephemerality is the one which concerns me the most. Although /b/ is ephemeral by design (where a post is automatically deleted once it reaches the fifteenth page) but, our today’s social media platforms are not ephemeral in general. Facebook keeps on remaining me what I did 4 years ago or my nth friendship anniversary with someone. This suggests that all our details and data are stored, analyzed and later utilized to give us a personalized feed. The “My Activity” of google which records everything, even things being asked to a google home speaker. The concept of “digital footprint” thus arises.
