The online ‘me’: Authentic identity or anonymity?

As I established in Topic 1, the dramatic advance of the Web in recent years has lead to many users becoming ‘residents’ on the Internet.

Warburton stresses how one’s identity on social media has become intertwined with their real life identity:

Increasingly persistent virtual presence on social media services […] has all but collapsed the boundary between being online and offline. We fashion the self through social interaction, community, and network affiliations and in these ways we construct our identities.

Note that Warburton uses the plural form for “identities”. Unlike in the real world, on the Web, people have the power to create multiple representations of themselves.

On the one hand, multiple identities can mean simply having presenting oneself differently on different sites to suit different purposes, such as having a personal identity and a professional identity.

For this, while one may alter the information they disclose dependent on context, their identity ultimately remains the same.

On the other hand, multiple online identities can be associated with anonymity.

Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor Project, places high importance on the ability to remain anonymous online:

The ability to be anonymous is increasingly important because it gives people control, it lets them be creative, it lets them […] research topics that aren’t necessarily ‘them’ and may not want tied to their real name for perpetuity.

Yes, the possibility of being anonymous grants us with the chance to, essentially, do and say what we want online. This might make people more likely to engage in online debates and get across certain ideas that they wouldn’t express under their real name.

With more and more employers using the internet as a way to look up potential employees, the web is no longer a place where identity can remain separate from real life (Krotoski, 2012). The ability to remain anonymous is one way to overcome this.

Indeed, it enables one to maintain a true identity, while also having the possibility of remaining anonymous when communicating something they themselves don’t want to be associated with.

But, there are risks…

I recently came across a documentary, based on a real story, about the detrimental effects of cyberbullying under fake identities, highlighting the dangers of online bullies who carry out vicious goading through personal attacks (Breeze, 2012) under pseudo names.

Should we be granted the ability to remain anonymous when it runs this kind of risk?

The internet has such a hold such huge importance in the world today. Is the ability to have both true and anonymous identities merely a platform for online bullying?

Or is the possibility of remaining anonymous in fact fostering a new platform for interesting ideas and discussion in today’s online communities (Hauser, 2014)?