- Donath, Judith S. “Identity and deception in the virtual community.” Communities in cyberspace. Routledge, 2002. 37-68.
- Bernstein, Michael S., et al. “4chan and/b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” ICWSM. 2011.
The value associated with human speech stems not only from its contents but various other factors namely the identity of the speaker, the speaker’s place in the social hierarchy, speaker’s speech characteristics and so forth. But speech in the virtual world is devoid of these physical entities due to which other markers tend to occupy its place as substitutes. What are the challenges in such environments? This is what the authors of the two papers are trying to probe and understand but from different angles.
[1] tries to map an evolving virtual environment, its use of identity and virtual equivalent of significance. It also describes various cues evolved in these settings to bolster the validity and importance of these identities created. The author goes on to then describe the various harms in giving importance to identity cues and eventually these virtual identities as they are susceptible to deception and impersonation. The author also quickly goes on to describing the effects of persistence of content on the behavior of the virtual crowd.
Although the virtual space described, usenet, is a thing of the past, few of the problems that plagued it are still prevalent in today’s virtual spaces. An interesting point the paper dealt upon, that I find interesting is the idea of harm due to taking advice from virtual and potentially unreliable sources. This brings up a rather interesting question, who is responsible for the physical harm due to signal or information from these virtual spaces? How can such incidents be managed? This cyber-physical interaction is relevant especially now, given that social media is a platform for much of the political and social debate.
[2] looks at 4chan, a imageboard website to understand the effect of anonymity and ephemerality in a virtual space where both those qualities are “deemed to be undesirable.” The author, conducts two experiments, one to identify the ephemerality of the content which in the virtual space is controlled through various mechanisms, and the other to identify the different identity cues which have gained prominence due to absence of traditional ones.
Given, the above feature of anonymity and ephemerality, 4chan is an interesting space to explore. Various other products like Instagram or Snapchat stories have the feature of ephemerality but not the anonymity like 4chan. But these ephemeral entities, I believe, have a common trait which makes it pool in more engagement from the users due to its inherent design, giving it an edge over non-ephemeral medias in certain cases. But this begs a question, is the user’s mental health due to it playing a part in increasing active user login time is something these product makers care about and if so what are the different steps that can be taken to manage it? I also find the natural conception and evolution of alternate forms of identity using to enforce group membership and status barrier interesting intriguing. One can also see that users having to use a product can create mechanisms rather naturally which the designer himself didn’t think about and allowing for such use helps in creating a more successful product.
Looking at various virtual spaces which have different design principles including those of how they manage identity, how one manages conflicts, if one’s virtual spaces have moderators and area specific rules, one can observe that the users and their behaviour tend to different. This is an interesting phenomenon. These identities in usenet as seen in [1] are more individualistic along with few group identity signifiers compared to 4chan as seen in [2]. This shows how the design of the virtual spaces creates very different user experience. How we manage these will definitely shape the conversations in the coming years.
