Reading:
[1] Donath, Judith S. “Identity and deception in the virtual community.” In Communities in cyberspace, pp. 37-68. Routledge, 2002.
Summary
This paper focused on how identity plays a key role in virtual communities. Specifically, Donath used Usenet, a structured bulletin board site that allows for multiple different newsgroups each with communal standards on how their respective communities are ran, to extrapolate how identity is established when social cues and reputations are non-existent factors. To capture how to establish identity, Donath provides models for honesty and deception in the form of signalling taken from biology. There are tow kinds of signals mentioned: assessment signals and conventional signals where assessment signals are “directly related to the trait being advertised” giving a reliable air while conventional signals are “correlated with a trait by custom or convention” giving an unreliable air. These signals helps provide context to the deep breakdown of a Usenet letter where writing style, personal interactions, signatures, domain address, account name/ID acted as clues, or signals, to your identity. This established a baseline for how people could point out trolls and even deceptive accounts trying to impersonate a respected member of Usenet sub-community. Donath concludes his paper by questioning how online communities can be built with improved communication with implicit social cues, but adds caution for possible unexpected social ramifications.
Reflections
The virtual environments have changed extensively since 1996 (late update to the paper). Growing up during the early stages of the internet, the idea of establishing an identity whether it be your current physical one or a new virtual identity (or even multiple virtual identities) is an intricate problem. While Usenet provided a great example of extrapolating key features to establish one’s identity, Usenet is now a very outdated system. New social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, etc. have come into the light. What are some new cues for trusting one’s identity on the internet? For example, with data breaches being the norm in today’s society where does identity theft come into play here? Can establishing a identity virtually help protect your physical one? Additionally, with so many social media platforms, trying to keep one identity across all platforms would be a hard problem. I would even challenge that we now can see social cues given a particular social media platform unlike Usenet.
Questions
- What are new ways of establishing identity and noting deception? Would it still be through assessment and conventional signaling?
- What new designs methodologies could be utilized to strengthen one’s identity online and in the physical world?
- Does identity theft encourage establishing yourself online? Could this be used to help retain you identity?
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Reading:
[2] Bernstein, Michael S., Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, and Gregory G. Vargas. “4chan and/b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” In ICWSM, pp. 50-57. 2011.
Summary
This paper explored 4chan’s /b/ forum community with goals to quantify ephemerality of /b/ and an analysis of identity and anonymity. 4chan is a forum board known for generating (among other things) memes and being the backbone to some of the internet’s culture. The author’s are pursuing an anomaly where 4chan’s /b/ forum functions entirely of anonymous users and is extremely ephemeral which is not entirely supported through related works. This presented an opportunity to explore a large online community in the wild where design implications can be extrapolated for online social environments. The first study engaged in data collection over a two week time period where the lifetime of all threads was observed. With the forum moving at such a fast pace it correlated with high ephemerality where actions like bumping and sage, forms of extending a thread’s lifetime, were also observed. The second study looked at the impact of anonymity which left a user’s identity hidden. The same two week sample was used where a 90% of all user’s remain anonymous while posting. But the interesting outcome was anonymity is viewed as a positive feature where open conversation can thrive which supports experimentation with new ideas (such as memes). Interestingly enough, one’s identity is never known but how a user interacts in the community gives an air of seniority to the community (not including moderators). The author’s conclude the paper seeking to conduct a closer study on the content of 4chan and its users.
Reflections
For the first study, I’v never really considered the pace of the threads before. In fact, how the threads work seems unique in that what is interesting to the current crowd at that moment. Of course, with Figure 3 from the paper does a great job highlighting this.
The authors show culture of /b/ is highly influenced with this fast paced environment (enough that users of /b/ cope with capturing some threads by download images as they come in). It begs the question of what design decisions could we grasp from a high paced, highly influential community and culture in another social platform?
As someone who is quite similar with 4chan, not as a regular user but more as a sparse lurker over the years of its existence, I found study 2’s results unsurprising. Through observation over the years it was unsurprising to see the high usage of the anonymous (anon) for the majority of the posts. Although, how can we use 4chan’s successful anonyomous structure to help support today’s online identity? Donath mentioned looking at key elements of a Usenet message, but we lose account name/ID and email address information. Would identifying writing style be enough? Would this open up identity deception? The author’s do offer some comments here: “Instead, the /b/ community uses non-technical mechanisms like slang and timestamping to signal status and identity.” This does align with Donath’s comments to some degree, but it would be interesting to see if is enough for identity if a platform is to support mass anonymous users.
Questions
- What other platforms can take advantage of anonymous interaction between users? Can this feature be extrapolated to a specific problem domain?
- Does content/memes change anonymous interaction long term that it’s hard to follow those who anonymous bat have been around for a long period of time?
