Copyright 1995 Richard Seltzer
My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities (B&R Samizdat Express, 2002), on CD ROM, includes the full text of this book plus Take Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, The Social Web, and hundreds of related articles. It is available from Amazon and from our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/myinperviewo.html
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Yes, people come to talk to other people, to socialize -- this is the electronic water hole, the corner pub. But at the same time, the Internet chat environment allows them to reveal as little or as much about themselves as they choose. They can "be themselves" -- with or without their actual name. Or they can build a separate and completely fictitious persona for themselves, which they elaborate over time. Or they can select new and different "handles" when they come back again -- either to start afresh or to have the fun of trying on different identities, like trying on new clothes or new hair colors or new cosmetics.
It's human nature to use anonymity, role play, and make-believe to create a liberating and fun party atmosphere. This can be your masquerade party, your electronic Mardi Gras. Reasonable assurance that you can, if you choose, remain anonymous is intoxicating, removing social inhibitions. It's also a way of revealing yourself to yourself -- what are you willing to say and do when no one you know will ever know about it? And like a social drinking environment, once you enter the party, there's social pressure to join in the fun -- to let go and depart from your normal behavior and normal expectations of yourself -- to the same degree as others there.
People pose and play roles and put on pretenses often in ordinary life, both deliberately and from habit. And one of the most difficult challenges we face is sorting the real from the deceptive, putting our confidence where it belongs, and trying to behave appropriately ourselves -- balancing our social roles with our need for inner integrity and authenticity. At a party where everyone is anonymous or playing outlandish roles, you know that you don't know -- you know that others are putting on acts, just as you are, and you have the fun of guessing and sensing the tension between the real and the make believe.
In ordinary life, we play the same roles day after day, over and over again; and we can easily lose our sense of ourselves as having an identity and integrity separate from those roles. In the theater and fiction, comic works often play on lack of self-awareness, mocking people who act mechanically and predictably, having lost themselves in their roles. Such works humorously prod the audience to wake up from their usual sleepwalking state and get back in touch with themselves. Other works explore the dramatic tension and tragic potential, when sensitive people become aware of the growing gulf between who they think they are or want to be and the ways they feel compelled to act.
Much of childhood play involves pretending to be whoever you want to be, trying on all kinds of fantastic roles with impunity -- enjoying the illusion of dangerous adventures without the actual danger -- and figuring out who you really are and want to be and what you really can do by testing again and again the distinction between make-believe and reality. And as adults, role-play make-believe games can still sometimes help us discover aspects of ourselves and of others. Ironically, when we temporarily cast aside our day-to-day roles, and try on other artificial ones, we force ourselves to be spontaneous -- no longer able to fall back on habit -- and hence by deliberately trying not to be ourselves, we may find ourselves and also may reveal more about ourselves to others than we ever intended. Perhaps we reveal ourselves the most when most we seek to disguise. Similarly, we discover new aspects of ourselves by identifying with the characters in the fiction we read or experience as well as through the act of writing and other artistic expression.
The Internet provides ample and unique opportunities for us to exercise this side of our personality and our social playfulness.
Keep in mind that anonymity in varying self-selected degrees is not just limited to chat. For email and other Internet activities, you are known by your user name, which is not necessarily the same as or even in any way connected with one's real name. Some services, like CompuServe and Prodigy arbitrarily assign numbers as user names. Others give the user a choice -- limited only by the need to avoid duplicate addresses.
Some Internet communities are deliberately providing expanded opportunities for self-selected degrees of anonymity and role play. These include the use of "avatars" -- on-line graphic images that match the name you choose and are changeable just as your name is. These avatars can be used in conjunction with chat sessions or as part of elaborate multi-player game environments. Such environments can be fantasy realms a la Dungeons and Dragons. Or they can resemble theater experiences where the audience becomes part of the show (like bizarre weddings where the audience are the guests, and murder-mystery dinners where the audience tries to figure out whodunit). They also can resemble the real-life events staged by such role-play organizations as the Society of Creative Anachronism, where members don elaborate period costumes, act out elaborate roles as if they lived in the Middle Ages, and socialize, flirt, and fight (in staged tournaments and battles) while keeping to the characters they have chosen. The science fiction classic Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson shows this trend developed to the extreme of a massive Internet-based alternate world -- the Metaverse -- where social interaction, business, and crime are carried on in parallel with the "real" world.
The immensity of the world is measured not just in sheer numbers people but also in how they are connected to and separated from one another. Today there are about ten times as many people in the world as there were in the days of Shakespeare. But the set of people he could actually interact with was far smaller than the population of the world. Even at the height of his popularity, at best a few thousand people in London constituted Shakespeare's community/world. Since that time, advances in communications and transportation have made the world much smaller in the sense that you and your words and images can go from one place to another far faster than before. But in another sense, those advances have made the world much larger. Mass broadcast media have virtually eliminated the physical and geographic boundaries which previously isolated communities. We all feel like we belong to the single vast community presented to us daily in the mass media - a world so large that the ordinary individual is no more than a dust speck, like the earth lost in a sea of stars, which are lost in a sea of galaxies.
To maintain a sense of our identity and individuality and self-worth we need to find or create worlds within the world -- communities that are a manageable size to which we feel we really belong. And these communities, whether on the Internet or in the physical world, can be self-selecting: to a much greater extent than previously in human history, we can choose where and how to belong, rather than having that imposed upon us as our birthright and birthburden.
Broadcast media create a mass, undifferentiated, and passive audience. They are supported by advertising which thrives in a huge homogeneous environment, where a single message can predictably elicit a common response from millions of people. The popular television quiz show Family Feud plays on this phenomenon, with contestants on screen and viewers at home testing themselves to see if their personal patterns of word association match those of the "survey." The right answer is not a fact that can be found in a reference book, but rather a response that matches the responses of a large sampling of the general public. You are rewarded not for intelligence or memory, but for thinking like everyone else.
Broadcast media create an environment in which only the people who appear on screen can be known and appreciated, and the mass viewing audience is anonymous, with no connections among one another other than their common experience of the media. And today many people have no other community than this mass community. As a side effect, celebrities are worshipped like gods and demigods. Many people feel compelled to try to establish a connection with one or more celebrities, and pay ridiculously high prices to get near. Some act as if they need contact with celebrities as confirmation or their own reality, identity and worth. We also see increasing instances where individuals commit bizarre, dangerous, and violent acts to attract the attention of the media and hence achieve some level of notorious celebrity themselves. And many others behave erratically, like ships without rudders, for if what you do doesn't really matter, you are free to do whatever you want.
While the Internet is large, connecting tens of millions of people, its effect is quite different from broadcast media. Here there are opportunities to find and interact with others who share your interests, concerns, and view of life; and you can also choose the size of the cyberpond you feel most comfortable swimming around in. Your community/world can consist of dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people from all over the globe.
Yes, here too we see many examples of celebrity worship. (And there are enormous business opportunities on the Internet that involve charging people for the opportunities to interact with celebrities). But the medium has a transforming effect, putting fans in touch with other fans, and presenting opportunities for them to form among themselves creative and self affirming communities.
So anonymity by choice on the Internet is far different from the imposed anonymity of broadcast media and mass society. It can be playful and life affirming, one way of feeling closer to others and to yourself.
Some communities require anonymity for them to be effective, because without it members would not participate. This the case with Alcoholics Anonymous, AIDS support groups, drug addiction support and other mutual help organizations, particularly when there is some risk of social ostracism or even legal consequences should the identity of the members be revealed.
Business also needs a mix of anonymity and verifiable identity to function smoothly. The success of marketing surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, focus groups, and employee and customer suggestion programs often depends on being able to guarantee anonymity, because with anonymity comes candor, freely expressing what you think without concerning yourself about what people will think of you or what the consequences of your honest words might be. There are cases where customers will only conduct business if their identity is concealed (for instance, because they don't want their competitors to know what they are doing), and also cases, like drug testing, where anonymity is required by law to protect the privacy of individuals. It might be far less expensive to achieve the desired degree of anonymity on the Internet than by traditional methods (like the difference between trying to create a vacuum on the earth's surface and taking advantage of the natural vacuum of outer space).
Many writers and politicians have expressed concern that personal privacy is at risk in a world in which computers record every transaction. They say that Big Brother is coming in a new incarnation, not in the form of totalitarian governments, but rather in the form of big business, armed with detailed information about all aspects of everyone's life. Ironically, in the case of the Internet, it seems that computer technology can provide us with new levels of self-chosen anonymity, greater privacy than ever possible before
Aside from fun and games, online anonymity can have far reaching practical consequences. In countries where citizens do not have the right to free speech and free press, the Internet provides an alternative mode of self expression, a natural channel for dissidents to interact with one another and with the outside world, including the media. People who wish to report wrong doing, but would feel at risk if they had to reveal their identity have similar needs. Such underground activity can be facilitated through "anonymous remailers," which allow ordinary users to perform feats of self disguise that otherwise would be limited to expert hackers. Anonymous remailers are Internet sites which provide the service disguising the origin of a message, resending it to its destination, and also forwarding the replies.
The ability to disguise who you are, or to only tell people as much about yourself as you wish, also helps avoid prejudice due to age or race or culture, so ideas can contend on their merits. The science fiction novel Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card shows an extreme instance of this phenomenon. Two bright 10-year-olds establish adult personas on the Internet and influence world politics through the cogency of their writings.
The anonymity of the Internet may also hold considerable attraction for celebrities. In our society, part of the price of fame and fortune is the loss of privacy. Many go to great lengths and pay large sums to recover some of that privacy. Often that means seclusion in walled off estates and subterfuge to conceal their whereabouts. For them the unique anonymity of the Internet means they can avoid the hassles and intrusions of fans, and yet still socialize with the general public or whatever electronic communities they choose. This is the online extension of the old tradition of kings and celebrities disguising themselves to mingle with the public -- to find out what they are really thinking (and at the same time to have fun "slumming").
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