Copyright 2002 by Richard Seltzer
Originally published by Wiley. The rights have reverted to the author
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Although the technology is quite different, many people associate privacy (information about who you are and what you do) with advertising (commercial messages you see that you never asked to see). Therefore, we'll also touch on concerns about "cookies" and "banner ads" and how you and your customers can zap both of them.
Required assignments for Chapter Two:
• try anonymous Web browsing at anonymizer.com
• try banner-free surfing with AdSubtract software from interMute
Electives:
• set up an anonymous online surprise party for a friend
Anonymity can be passive (privacy) or active (masquerade). Privacy means
preventing others from getting access to information about you. Masquerade
means creating a new identity.
You may put a high value on privacy, even though you have nothing to
hide. And you may value masquerade as enabling you to do things that
otherwise you would never do -- a liberating experience that allows you
to explore who you are and who you want to be.
You probably want to have control over what other people and companies know about you and your preferences, habits, financial condition, and behavior. So do your customers.
Except in special cases (which we'll discuss below), the spread of personal information is likely to be a nuisance, or perhaps an embarrassment, rather than leading to financial loss or calculable damage. But this issue is emotionally charged. Loyal customers can turn into rapid enemies over privacy concerns. Hence you need hands-on experience to build a personal appreciation for the special importance of privacy on the Internet.
Some people won't use an online service unless they can remain anonymous. They don't want to leave a trail, and they don't want merchants to gather personal information about them and their surfing habits or buying habits, mainly because they don't want to be inundated with unwanted email and other intrusive commercial contacts.
Consequences of insensitivity
Merchants schooled in the world of physical commerce and mass market strategies place a very high value on detailed demographic information and details about the buying habits of individuals and classes of individuals. They are used to collecting and using, buying and selling such information for direct mail (postal) and telemarketing efforts. When they issue coupons or advertise special offers with a number to call or an address to write to, they are interested in making the immediate sale, but also presume that they are buying the right to save, organize, and reuse or sell the information they gather in the process. Naturally, they extend that expectation to the realm of the Internet, and evaluate opportunities and make business plans with the value of the customer-related information included in the equation. But that could be an enormous mistake.
For example, in Nov. 1999, DoubleClick bought Abacus Direct. DoubleClick sells banner ad space and delivers banner ads to the Web sites of their clients. Abacus Direct kept databases with information about consumer habits. DoubleClick planned to combine the Abacus information with their own information about consumers' online behavior (the sites and pages they visit). The result would be extremely detailed profiles of tens of thousands of users -- information that advertisers would value highly. But news of this plan sparked a firestorm of protest from consumers, leading to an FTC investigation.
DoubleClick dropped the plan, but not before their public image had suffered enormous damage.
In the early days of business on the Web, physical-world marketers thought that email was "free" and that it would be insane not to use email to put their messages in front of the eyeballs of millions of people. Even with ridiculously low rates of response, the benefits would be huge. They assembled and used and sold enormous, undifferentiated distribution lists. In so doing, they enraged many of the people who received those messages, as well as the Internet service providers whose access lines and systems were slowed by them.
Email does cost, but the cost is not born by the sender, as with postal mail and long-distance phone calls; but rather by the companies that provide service to the recipients and the recipients themselves -- in terms of time and nuisance and inboxes so clogged with unwanted messages that important ones cannot be received.
As a consequence, recipients of unwanted commercial email (known as "spam") often struck back at the perpetrators with pranks and guerrilla tactics.
Spam still persists, clogging all our inboxes -- thanks, in part, to techniques that help mask the spammers from the would-be vigilantes. Just today, I received a spam message, advertising a database CD-ROM with names, contact information, physical address, phone, Fax, domain name, and contact email addresses for over 12 million domain name owners, worldwide. To comply with the letter of the law, they even include an "email remove list" to help you to avoid sending your message to those who don't want to receive it. Price: $999.99, plus $25 shipping.
But, today, spam messages primarily promote casinos, porn sites, and questionable offers, which makes use of spam tactics by legitimate businesses all the more unwise, because the medium becomes the message and the user becomes guilty by association with the sleazy companies that continue to use it regularly.
Responsible companies have learned that the damage incurred to them by their using spam can be far greater than the benefit. Laws have also been drafted to prevent or at least curb spam, but the PR damage remains a far greater disincentive than the law.
As a side-effect of the proliferation of spam, many Internet users have become very sensitive about how basic information about them -- such as their email address -- is used by online businesses. Their street address and telephone number are public knowledge (unless they pay extra to be unlisted). But they consider their email address to be private information, and don't want to be included on any distribution list, without giving their permission.
What constitutes "permission"? Many Web sites require users to "register" to take full advantage of the "free" services available there, and have "terms of use" that you must agree to as part of the registration process. Typically, you have to click to see the lengthy small-print document that describes all that you are agreeing to. And most people simply check that they agree to the terms, without bothering to read the document. Hence, it might be tempting to include permission for commercial use of user information in those terms. But that's probably not a good idea.
For example, in April 2001, a reporter at The Register noticed some
peculiar wording in the "terms of use" agreement that users of Microsoft's
Passport service tacitly agreed to. "By posting messages, uploading files,
inputting data, submitting any feedback or suggestions, or engaging in
any other form of communication with or through the Passport Web Site...
you are granting Microsoft and its affiliated companies permission to:
1. Use, modify, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly
perform, reproduce, publish, sublicense, create derivative works from,
transfer, or sell any such communication.
2. Sublicense to third parties the unrestricted right to exercise any
of the foregoing rights granted with respect to the communication.
3. Publish your name in connection with any such communication....
No compensation will be paid with respect to Microsoft's use of the materials
contained within such communication."
In this case, the public outrage was fueled by the Big Brother image of Microsoft, as a huge company, with the power to use such information in a wide variety of ways, to further build its strength, and further erode the privacy of its customers. Within a few days, Microsoft apologetically rewrote the terms for its Passport service, which probably had been mistakenly drafted by overzealous lawyers, rather than by nefarious marketers.
The more common approach is to include questions at the bottom of the registration form that explicitly ask for permission to send you commercial email. Often the default setting is to have the boxes already checked -- so you have to uncheck them if you don't want to receive advertising, newsletters, etc. by email and don't want them reselling your email address and information about you.
Consider your options and the possible consequences very carefully before gathering and using or selling or buying information about online consumers. Think of doing business on the Internet like doing business in a foreign country, where you need to respect cultural sensitivities -- paying attention to factors you never considered important before -- or suffer grave consequences. The privacy of personal, commercial-related information -- including email addresses -- is a very sensitive issue on the Internet. News of intentional wrong-doing and foolish blunders related to privacy spread very rapidly.
For example, here are excerpts from a well-informed and well-reasoned
privacy-related warning that was sent out by email to a small list of friends,
who then sent it to their friends, etc., spreading rapidly in typical Internet
style, in April 2001:
To protect yourself from hackers and thieves:How much are you willing to sell your privacy for?
1. Visit Steve Gibson's website at www.grc.com frequently to read up on all the latest security hacks.
2. Subscribe to Fred Langa's newsletters: http://www.langalist.com/newsletters/2001/2001-03-29.htm. This is a top resource for Windows users.
To avoid being spied upon by big companies (or outright crooks) that mine your web activity for their profit:
1. Don't use AOL Version 6 software or Netscape 6 browser unless you know how to turn off the monitoring. Purportedly, these packages install software to report to AOL the names and locations of every file you download over the net--even if they aren't running at the time.
2. Avoid "free" ISP services. Almost all monitor your activities and sell your profile to unknown parties.
3. Never respond to an email that invites you to go to a website and register for a contest. These emails (and the websites that you are sent to) are sent by crackers collecting your email address and other information... Once they know where you are, you can be targeted... until they finally get a credit card number or other useful information... Legitimate companies frequently send out contest or registration forms to their users, but just because they say it came from Palm Computing, doesn't mean it did. Look at the URLs in the location bar of your browser. If the website is at www.palm.com, it might be legit. If the website is a multi digit IP address (like 325.54.99.33 or any other number) it's surely a scam.
4. Don't let your kid or teen play NeoPets (www.neopets.com). This is a fun internet game that encourages kids to enter data on their parents financial situation (and other info) to gain points that can be used to play the game. It's kind of like Dungeons and Dragons but you have to fill out an online form for a second home mortgage in order to raise your player character to level 2. I'm not kidding!!!!To avoid paying for someone else's BMW:
1. Do not deal with Juno or other "free" ISP services or other "communities" that place software on your computer to "use extra computing cycles" when your machine is idle. According to the terms of use of these organizations:
-- your computer cycles belong to them,
-- you can't turn off your computer, and
-- you can't even ask what the software is doing.What can their software do?
-- Scan your disk looking for expired or invalid licenses and report you for software piracy. (Do you know every program on you hard disk?)
-- Scan your disk looking for porn and report you to the authorities.
-- Scan your disk for non-Microsoft applications (like Word Perfect) and direct a huge advertising campaign to you to switch vendors.
-- Use your machine to solve commercial problems and make a huge profit for themselves
-- Use your machine to model nuclear explosions, germ warfare and other Defense Department research projects use your machine to support the computing needs of any number of companies and programs for which you have no sympathy.Even if the vendor is 100% squeaky clean and honorable, their software opens a path to your computer. You and they will have virtually no way to know if a cracker gang has replaced the intended application with one of their own and your computer might become:
-- an engine for downloading porn
-- a website for the neo-nazi party
-- a resource for Iraq's weapons research2. Don't fall for phony charities. The current buzz about six million PC users helping fight Cancer is a rip-off. The system is run by a for-profit company that uses your computer resources to solve problems for drug companies. They make big profits, you may end up paying higher connect fees to your ISP depending on your service contract, and the drug companies will not lower their prices. You could also fight cancer this way by offering to work for the drug company for free.
Simply, don't allow any company or individual to place software on your computer that causes it to receive commands from the Internet or do local computing and broadcast results back over the net.
Good luck,
Ashley Grayson [VP, Web Tools International, a software engineering, firm, www.wti.com]
So why did you just sign up for free services on the Internet, registering with those services and hence providing them with information about yourself?
It's a tradeoff. You give them something and they give you something.
Remember, you started the process by opening a new email account and used
that account when you registered at the other services.
Yes, the email provider has your "real" email address; but the others
just have this free one. You'll expect both useful advertising messages
(matching your real interests) and plain spam to accumulate in this free
account, rather than your primary account.
Many people have a double-standard when it comes to commercial privacy. Yes, it's easy to get self-righteous. How dare anyone gather information about you? And how dare they use that information in ways that you didn't anticipate, selling data about your online behavior and purchases to other companies, who then bombard you with ads, clogging your email box, wasting your time and your online resources?
But if a vendor or a Web site offers the smallest reward in exchange for permission to gather and/or distribute information about your preferences and buying behavior, you readily agree. Hence, you use a "convenience card" at your local supermarket, inviting the store to track your every purchase, in exchange for discounts on a few products.
We discussed some of the tradeoffs involved in "free" services (and Juno in particular) in Chapter One. Part of that price is what you give up in personal privacy.
Many online marketing companies have built their businesses around "permission"
or opt-in email. For example, at www.mypoints.com, you earn points toward
rewards "simply by reading email, shopping online, touring web sites and
more." You receive their email in a Web-based format, with images and links.
By clicking in response to such a message, you can earn frequent flier
miles on your favorite airline or points toward products or services of
interest to you. The messages often announce special offers and limited-time
bargains of the very kind you are interested in (based on the profile that
you provide them). Reportedly, members don't consider these messages as
spam. Rather, their main complaint is that they don't get enough
of this kind of mail.
Instead of discounts and points toward rewards, www.iwon.com
gives you entries in cash-prize, lottery-style contests. You register,
so they know exactly who you are and can correlate that information with
records of what you searched for and clicked on at their site. You automatically
collect entries in these contests (up to a maximum of 100 per day) for
clicking on links marked with gray numbers and a prompt (">") to the left
of the link. "For example, clicking on a link with 5> to the left of it
will give you 5 entries towards each of the Daily, Monthly and Annual Sweepstakes."
They show you your current number of entries in a real-time counter at
the top of your screen. They also occasionally offer "Bonus" entries for
various activities. "Every day, iWon gives away a guaranteed $10,000 cash
prize (through March 31, 2002)."
PeoplePC offers a low-cost package deal on both a PC and Internet service
for a claim to your eyeballs and your personal information. Today, for
as low as $24.95 a month (the price depends on which PC you choose), you
get:
• a name-brand computer, replaced every 3 years,
• unlimited Internet access,
• 10 Mbytes for your own website,
• telephone support
• special shopping offers
Meanwhile, GetPaid4.com will pay you to use your computer, as long as you are connected to the Internet and active. Basically, they share the money they are paid by advertisers with the people who agree to view the advertising. They put a bar at the bottom of your screen that displays ads as you surf the Web. Apparently, the payout rate is usually around 40 cents per hour. (For December 1999, it was 48 cents per hour.) "Every month we guarantee that the payment will be at least 70+% of net advertising revenues generated by users." GetPaid4 considers you "Active" if you move your mouse at least one time per minute. "If after one consecutive minute you have not moved your mouse your Getpaid4 Bar will turn Yellow on the left side and time will stop counting. Once you move your mouse again the Bar will turn back to Green and your usage will continue being tracked." In other words, you get penalized if you are actually interested in what you see, and spend some time reading it. You also have to periodically click on the ads in the GetPaid4 bar to qualify. "A member's active status is defined by maintaining a 0.5 to 5 percent response rate on the ads. If at one point in time you are considered inactive, all you have to do to become active again is stay within the required click through range and make sure you are meeting the other requirements such as being connected to the Internet and moving your mouse once every minute."
Note that if you get a computer from PeoplePC and use it for about 63 hours or more of qualified surfing under GetPaid4 each month, the payments you receive from GetPaid4 will probably offset what you pay for your PC and Internet access service from PeoplePC.
Serious privacy -- When you absolutely, positively need to be anonymous
The definition of "privacy" and the laws related to it vary considerably from one country to another. In special instances, courts in the U.S. put an extremely high value on privacy, for instance with regard to medical records (especially when AIDS is involved), some personnel files, records of drug testing, information about juvenile offenders and ex-convicts, the identity of parents who give their children up for adoption, and in some cases, the identity and whereabouts of witnesses.
Personal information that to ordinary consumer might be insignificant, something they'd willing to trade off for a benefit like a free service or entry in a lottery, to someone else might be a serious concern, perhaps even a matter of life and death. Operating in a global environment, that includes some countries that operate as police states, with little concern for personal privacy and no protection for free speech, you need to be sensitive to the needs of these individuals and aware of the options available to them. Also, remember that even in the US, freedom of speech may be abridged by fear of retribution by employers, government, spouse, parents, etc., unless people have a means to mask their identity when saying what they truly believe and feel strongly about.
Check the Center for Democracy and Technology http://snoop.cdt.org for discussion of the civil liberties and privacy implications of software that gathers information about Web site visitors. They run a program that captures your email address and automatically sends you an email message to demonstrate what can be known about you if you simply access a Web page.
People who have cancer, mental illness, and substance abuse problems also sometimes need assurance of anonymity before they will seek help from professionals or from one another (in mutual support groups). They may have reason to fear social ostracism, harm to their career, or even legal consequences should their identity be revealed to the wrong people.
Writers and politicians have expressed concern that the ability of computers to record your every online activity and to quickly correlate all information related to you represents a serious threat to individual liberty. The Big Brother who is watching you, need not be a totalitarian government. It could be a large company, or many companies cooperating with one another.
Fortunately, the Internet also provides opportunities for new levels of anonymity, for greater privacy than ever possible before, while giving you the ability to widely disseminate whatever you have to say. In countries where citizens do not have the right to free speech and free press, the Internet provides a 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 can also use the Internet.
"Anonymous remailer" sites disguise the origin of a message, resending it to its destination, and also forwarding the replies. They provide an extra degree of privacy, allowing ordinary users to disguise themselves in ways that otherwise would only be available to expert hackers. Naturally, such sites are constantly subject to legal challenge -- like newspaper reporters being forced to reveal their sources. Their defense against such challenges depends on part on the laws of the country where they operate, and in part on the nuisance factor -- how difficult it is to force them to reveal information across international boundaries.
To sample such a service, try www.exonet.org/remailer (in the Netherlands); or go to a search engine, like AltaVista, and look for "anonymous remailer".
Anonymous Web browsing
All recent browsers (less than about four years old) support "cookies." That means that they store on your computer a file that can automatically relay to sites that you visit information about your recent Web surfing experiences, such as what page you saw before coming to their site, and what pages you have visited at their site. Based on that information and anything else that you voluntarily tell them, they may present you with automatically generated Web pages, tailored to your presumed preferences, as well as related advertising. They can also use this information to fine-tune their site to better serve you and others like you.
The sites you visit can also know your "domain" (the part of an email address to the right of the @ sign). But they probably won't know your complete email address, unless you give it to them. If they do have your email address and other information about you, they can correlate that with what they learn from "cookies" about your experiences and preferences at their site.
If you don't want to let Web sites gather that kind of information about you, you can change the default setting on your browser to disable cookies. In recent versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, click on Tools, then Internet Options, then the Security tab. Move the slider bar from Medium (the default setting), up to High if you want to totally disable cookies. You can have different security settings for different classes of sites (chosen by you), such as Trusted Sites and Restricted Sites. In recent versions of Netscape, click on Edit, then Preferences, then Advanced. There you can choose to disable cookies altogether or to have your browser warn you whenever a Web page tries to get access to your cookie file. But each page you go to might have as many as half a dozen cookies associated at it, making the alert a major nuisance. And many important sites -- including your online bank -- might not let you see their content and do business with them if you don't allow them to put their cookies on your system.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. Services like Anonymizer www.anonymizer.com permit you to surf anonymously, even with your cookies turned on. If you want to buy something online, you'll have to clearly and verifiably identify yourself; but information about your casual surfing can remain private.
As required a assignment for this chapter, go to www.anonymizer.com and try their anonymous surfing for free. If you want to use it regularly, they currently charge a subscription fee of $14.99 for three months. When enabled, this software encrypts cookies from remote sites and reorganizes them in a temporary session-only cookie that disappears as soon as you close your browser. That way Web sites can't match who you are (from your login information) with what you do at their site (from the cookies left on you PC). It also encrypts information about the addresses of the sites you visit, to prevent your ISP, employer, spouse, or anyone else with access to your PC or your connection to the Internet from keeping track of what you do online.
If you need even stronger anonymity, you can sign up for anonymous dial-up service, with Anonymizer as your ISP (currently, $59.99 for 3 months).
In addition, their "Window Washer" hard-drive cleaning software (for $29.95) clears away all trace of your Internet use from your PC, and makes erased files unrecoverable. (Think of this as the computer equivalent of a shredding machine.)
Anonymizer, states its mission in the context of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks... Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Anonymizer's mission is "to ensure that an individual's right to privacy is not compromised by going online."
Banner erasers
When you are buying or selling banner advertising, keep in mind that many people who understand the Internet and use it often will never see those ads of yours. If you are paying per impression (CPM), many of those visitors you are paying for may be of no value to you.
For instance, software from www.webwasher.com, a spin-off of Siemens in Germany, allows you to browse without seeing banner ads -- which not only removes the nuisance distractions of advertising, but also gives you faster response time, for more productive sessions on the Web. Current price: $29.00 US.
Likewise, AdSubtract products from interMute remove both banner ads and cookies. As part of your required assignment, visit www.adsubtract.com, go to their download area and get a copy of their AdSubtract SE, the version that is free for personal use. Follow the online directions to install the software. Then use it to view 1) your company's Web site, and 2) a major portal that's heavily-laden with banner ads, like Yahoo.
Open AdSubtract and take a close look at what this software provides. Click on the "Filters" tab, and you can choose up to accept cookies from selected sites (for instance, your online bank). Click on the "Browsers" tab, and you see that it works with IE, Netscape, AOL, and Opera. You can set up the software to work with all browsers or only with one (in case you have more than one browser installed and want to do banner-free and cookie-free browsing with just one of them). Click on the "Stats" tab to see how many ads and cookies the software has blocked for you.
By the way, when I uninstalled AdSubtract, it removed itself automatically from IE, but not from Netscape. If you have a similar experience with Netscape, click on Edit, then Preferences, then on the + sign next to Advanced, then on Proxies. AdSubtract may have left its manual proxy setting in place. Simply click next to Direct connection to the Internet if that's how you had it before. Or click on View next to Manual proxy configuration and reenter the settings you had before.
The business value of anonymity
In general, business 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 possible consequences.
It can be far easier and less expensive to gather anonymous marketing data on the Internet than by traditional methods. For instance, you can quickly sample public opinion and/or create and administer effective surveys over the Internet, getting candid reactions to your and your competitors' products from customers and prospects. And these surveys can be "blind" (anonymous) so the people providing the answers don't know who is sponsoring the survey (which could skew the results).
Also, you could give your employees an anonymous Web-based channel to vent their frustration, to report problems and wrongdoing within the company, and to express their ideas for change, outside the chain of command and without fear of retribution. If they do not have such a channel inside the company, they may well do their venting with shielded identities in newsgroups or email discussion lists, or they may turn to one of the many specialized anonymous whistleblower sites on the Internet, such as www.fuckedcompany.com. In other words, thanks to the Internet, overzealous efforts to stifle employee expression could lead to widespread and uncontrolled dissemination of such remarks.
Fucked Company requires validation by the press before posting news in their Recent Fucks area. But the Happy Fun Slander area is wide open, and very well populated with unfriendly swipes at major Internet companies. Fucked Company tells users: "While your identity is completely anonymous (this webserver doesn't even keep traffic logs), know that anything you write in this form will become viewable by the general public..." You might want to take an occasional look there, and also do an occasional search in newsgroups to see what people are saying about your company, your partners, your competitors, and your customers. You can be sure that reporters regular check these sources for story leads.
Polling and surveys
Free Web-hosting sites typically offer free polling applications for you to add to your Web pages to amuse and engage your visitors. For instance, you could ask "what to you think of ___ on a scale of 1 to 5?" "President _______ just said _______. Do you agree or disagree?" "Rumor has it that the Yankees want to trade Derek Jeter for Sammy Sosa. Should they or shouldn't they?" The current results are tabulated and displayed live (so you can immediately see the effect of your "vote.")
If you are interested in getting serious results, rather than simply
providing entertainment, turn to Zoomerang.com. Zoomerang lets you create
surveys and get feedback. They protect the privacy and confidential information
of members who build and deploy surveys and also the panelists who register
to respond to surveys. You can build your survey based on one of their
templates or customize one. You can choose from a list of qualified respondents
(panelists who have pre-signed with Zoomerang) or enter your own email
list. You launch your surveys with a personalized email greeting to each
panelist.
Respondents earn awards for completing surveys. You can view the results
in graphic form, with your browser.
What's going on here? Making sense of banner zapping, cookie crunching software
On the Internet, software vendors often profit from both sides of an on-going struggle.
One company develops cookies and another comes up with a cookie zapper. One comes up with creative ways to generate personalized Web pages on the fly based on information about the behavior of individual users. And another helps block disclosure of user information. One develops software to serve banner ads, and another sells an ad basher.
Each radically new development creates demand for its antithesis in a gentle tug-of-war.
So when you are tempted to change your whole business to take advantage of a new capability, keep in mind that software designed to undermine that capability will probably be available soon. Not that the capability will go away or be totally negated, but rather that it will probably not be as widely deployed or as effective as you originally presumed.
To spot new business opportunities, look for solutions that are diametrically opposed to business model that is most popular today. For instance, if, as discussed in the Introduction, you see companies successfully supporting the "Internet is the computer" model, you might want to develop services to support the opposite, "Internet-on-the-desk" model.
Expect Internet software development and business models to advance in this push-pull fashion, with few outright winners, but rather a continuous tension, in a gentle rocking tug-of-war among opposite trends, with an ever-growing series of opportunities on both ends.
Imagine you've rented it and are wearing it. Tell yourself who you are now. Then begin to tell old friends who you know are online that this is who you are -- sending them email under this new persona and not letting on who you really are. Then try out this persona with total strangers in anonymous gathering areas, like live chat and email discussion groups. Enjoy. Take this project seriously enough for you to begin to feel what it's like to shed your everyday identity for awhile and become someone else. You've been reincarnated on line.
Now, as an elective assignment for this chapter, approach a friend under this new identity of yours and encourage that friend (or spouse or significant other) to don a new identity too and join you for online discussion at a time and place of your choosing. Tell this person that you've organized an online masquerade party in his or her honor. Set the theme for the party. Approach at least three other people and write them too, inviting them to the party. Follow up with online greeting cards. Go to www.americangreetings.com, www.hallmark.com, www.blab.com, www.e-cards.com, ecards.amazon.com, or www.bluemountain.com, and check out their "ecard" offerings. These are graphic and sometimes animated messages that you can personalize and send for free by email. Send out such messages periodically to your invitees, reminding them and getting them psyched for your event.
If you regularly encounter the invitees and guest of honor in the real world, pass along some notes and pictures in the same vein, without giving away that you are the source. Maybe offer a tangible prize for the partygoer with the best new identity in keeping with the theme or for whoever does the best job of staying in character.
If you can, hold this party now. Do it in a chat room you set up for the occasion. If you still feel ill-equipped to go that far, read ahead to Chapter Seven, where you'll learn how to set up your own chat room, and maybe even read ahead to Chapter Eleven and include use of a webcam in your online party. But sooner or later, do it -- for the fun of it and for the experience and what you can learn about yourself and about the Internet business environment from this experience.
Invitation to be someone else
The ability to try on different identities is one of the attractions of the Internet. It can be fun and liberating, like trying on new clothes or new hair colors or new cosmetics. Try it yourself, and consider if and how your business might want to tap into this liberating energy. Also, learn your way around enough so you'll be aware of how easy it is for people to use false Internet identities to commit fraud and for other malevolent purposes. That might make you a bit more defensively skeptical when meeting new people and potential business associates on line.
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 your real name. Some services, like CompuServe and Prodigy arbitrarily assign numbers as user names. Most give you a choice of name -- limited only by the need to avoid duplicate addresses. Often the process for signing up for a new service, like chat, is an invitation to masquerade. When you choose your "handle," you can decide whether you want your email address or other information about you to be visible to other participants, and you can decide whether you want to build a new fun identity.
Many people find that masquerading helps them relax and speak their piece, without worrying about what other people may think. It's intoxicating, like a glass or two of wine, removing inhibitions, and encouraging people who under normal conditions might be shy, to let loose.
Try one of the wide-open public chat rooms at Yahoo or another major portals to see how people use anonymity, as a mask behind which they can enjoy flirting or trash talking or just speaking candidly.
Also note that giving everyone the ability to disguise who they are helps avoid prejudice due to age, race, gender, or culture, so ideas can contend on their merits.
Be yourself by pretending to be someone else
By taking on another role, you can also reveal yourself to yourself, finding out what you are willing to say when no one you know need ever know that you said it. Once you get started, 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 that others do.
Often, in ordinary life, people put on pretenses both deliberately and from habit. We take it for granted that we have to sort the real from the deceptive in others, and that we too need to shield our "true" selves by playing roles appropriate for the business and social situations that we find ourselves in. 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 separate from those roles.
Childhood play often involves trying on fantasy roles, enjoying the illusion of wild adventures without the actual danger, as you gradually build an everyday identity for yourself and test the boundaries between make-believe and reality. As adults, role-play games can still sometimes help us discover aspects of ourselves and of others. Ironically, when we try on artificial roles, we force ourselves to be spontaneous -- no longer able to fall back on habit -- and hence by trying not to be ourselves, we may find ourselves and also may reveal more about ourselves to others than we intended. Perhaps we reveal ourselves the most when most we seek to disguise.
Some sites take this online masquerade to a higher level with "avatars" -- graphic representations of the people visiting a site. Typically, you move your avatar around, like you would a character in a video game, and your online "body language," typically in 3D graphic settings, enhances what you say to one another in text and/or voice chat. Check Moove at www.moove.com/netscape/default.htm. Often much of the traffic at such sites is flirtatious in a matchmaking/dating mode.
For access to more than a dozen 3D virtual worlds in which you can masquerade, check www.digitalspace.com/avatars. If you get really ambitious, you can design (rather than just choose) your own avatars and even build your own 3D worlds. Check http://www.digitalspace.com/avatars/build.html
Avatars can be used in conjunction with chat sessions or as part of elaborate multi-player game environments. Such environments can be fantasy realms for role-play, game-like events; or they can resemble theater experiences where the audience becomes part of the show.
While it has been possible to conduct online meetings for several years now, few companies do so. While text can convey information in a form that can easily be saved and searched for future reference, much of the expressive capability of face-to-face interactions -- facial expression and body language -- is lost. Similarly, with concalls over phone lines, the voices are disembodied. You may know what everybody "said" explicitly, but you may not have confidence that you know what they meant, or how committed they are to what they said. We spend our whole lives learning to read non-verbal clues, learning who to trust and when, and learning how to build trust in ourselves. And we feel uncomfortable when that rich social context gets cut away and all we have is words -- especially if we are dealing with people we've never met face-to-face. In the novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson takes avatar development to its logical conclusion, where the online images fully mirror the facial expressions of their "owners" and hence the online world becomes the setting for real business and real social interaction. If that's even possible, it's still a long way off. But the more experience you have in online social interaction, the better you'll learn how to interpret the behavior you encounter online, both for business and for recreation.
Why online "community" matters
Mass broadcast media have eliminated geographic boundaries which previously isolated communities. We feel like we belong to the single vast community presented to us daily in the mass media -- a world so large that the individual is no more than a dust speck. We are part of 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, as in the quiz show Family Feud, where the right answer is a response that matches the responses of a sampling of the general public. We are rewarded for thinking like everyone else.
Only the people who appear on screen can be known and appreciated, and we in the viewing audience are anonymous, not by choice, but by necessity. We have no connections with one another other than our common experience of the media.
As a side effect, we worship celebrities and pay ridiculously high prices to get near them. And some people commit bizarre acts to attract the attention of the media and hence achieve some level of notorious celebrity themselves.
To maintain a sense of our individuality and self-worth we need to find or create communities that are a manageable size and to which we can feel that we really belong. The Internet makes that possible.
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 our interests, concerns, and view of life. Here we can choose where and how to belong, rather than having that imposed on us by accidents of birth or physical location.
Yes, we see many examples of celebrity worship on the Internet. But here, fans can readily get in touch with other fans, and form among themselves creative and self-affirming communities.
Hence the masquerade anonymity that we choose for ourselves on the Internet is far different from the faceless anonymity imposed by broadcast media and a mass-market society. Our masquerade can be playful and life-affirming, a way to feel closer to others and to ourselves.
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