Blog Post 11/10/2008

A hypothetical question often asked of people, in an attempt to understand their personality, is whether they would rather have the ability to fly or the ability to be invisible. The obvious first answer most people give is “both” and this is what the internet had essential given us. Finally you had the virtual ability to travel around the globe for the knowledge or experience you were in search of. Simultaneously you had the ability to be invisible, either lurking to see what discussions others’ were having or masking yourself as someone or something entirely different.

Plato posed the issue of invisibility in writing The Republic. Gyges found a ring that gave him the ability to cloak himself in invisibility – something many of us have wished we might have at some points in our lives; usually after spilling coffee down our shirts – or while living through high school as a geek. In The Republic Gyges used this power for purely selfish means, with no regard to how others were affected by his ambition. In the supposition Plato expects that Gyges would do such a thing because human nature has a tendency towards hedonism. In terms of the early iterations of the open internet there are many examples of this exact sort of action.

A common game that played out time and again through early email systems, IRC and BBS sessions was where individuals would mask themselves or pose as other users. Using a few simple shell commands you could mask your email address with another user’s and essentially fool average people into thinking they had received email from someone they hadn’t. Thinking back I can remember a rather common joke was to send email from mtv.com and whitehouse.gov to friends. While it was obviously always a joke when something came from the Whitehouse address for some reason it was more believable when something came from MTV.

A new show titled The Real World had recently aired on MTV and kicked reality TV into high gear. Students were particularly easy targets for such pranks. If you can imagine spam email was almost non-existent at that time, so when you received an email you still had some level of faith it came from who it listed it was coming from. The most damaging of these types of emails would be the ones that came from people you knew, or more precisely the ones you thought were coming from people you knew. Many relationships were put on edge by vengeful and vindictive people who felt wronged online and would post very offensive statements under their victim’s ID.

While invisibility is most often associated with nefarious activity flight is often the opposite; flight is still imagined for selfish uses but for much more utilitarian efforts, such as getting the shopping done quickly or taking trips around the world with no travel costs. Superman takes Louis Lane for a romantic flight through the clouds. While obviously a selfish move it is at least romantic and solidifies the action as being more heroic than nefarious.

According to John Hodgman who did some informal reporting on the topic for This American Life, people often move towards flight even after choosing invisibility due to the utility of flight. Invisibility often leads to doing something society would find unacceptable but not so with flight. For this reason even after considering invisibility as their desired choice people will often switch to flight to avoid being labeled as socially unacceptable. In fact John Hodgman states that, “Flight is the hero; selfless and confident and unashamed, while invisibility is the villain.” In our story anonymity is equated to invisibility and we will soon understand how the online social networks have also come to shame those who choose invisibility over flight.

So why would you participate in communities wrought with this type of behavior? Primarily because it was interesting, it was a game on the best of days – even if those days were filled with some of the worst attempts to hijack your identity. For those who soul searched, wondering how they survived high school and how they could remake themselves in a new image; this community offered an opportunity to do just that. Only intellect and wit mattered in this world. There was almost no photo sharing and little accountability in the early years of the internet. If your intellect and wit faltered you could easily recreate your personality as something else, as someone else. The number of faces you presented to the world was limited only by your imagination and ability to create new user IDs. Equal to this was the interest in dissecting other users’ personalities; discovering who or what was real or not.

The fact that these invisibility actions are still pervasive within today’s more socially organized network is due to the vast difference in online literacy as opposed to technology or a lack of digital maturity. There is a mixture of experimentation and stealth with a larger segment of the digital population using anonymity for harm now as opposed to earlier times when most tests of invisibility was related to the prior scenarios of pranks and learning.

The differences in literacy relate more closely to the evolution of digital personality than between users of different generations and backgrounds. With a text based system, low on graphics and other stimuli, so many of our senses are removed from the equation allowing our intuition to become heightened. Learning to intuit and then verify fact from fiction became the key literacy of life in the digital world. No other single factor became as important in this early period. In learning to understand others in this respect I, along with everyone else, was forced to evolve. Through interaction the anonymity, invisibility, false representations and ego’s started to slip away. Our attempts at community building once again required us to build social capital – the natural resource from which trust and relationships grow. And thus John Hodgman’s finding that most people shy away from invisibility due to its socially repugnant reputation finds its way into our online world. No example stands out more clearly than that of Dateline NBC’s series To Catch a Predator where online, digital world personalities are created (often on both sides of the ensuing social interactions) in an attempt to capture sexual predators in the analog world.