Anonymity as an Emotional Protection
Our group project in this class, the Identity Manager, is centered around preserving anonymity on the Internet as the digital sphere is moving closer to a ‘clear-name’ environment where your online activity can be traced back to your true identity. The implications of our project effort are two-sided: we’re both scaffolding the benefits of anonymity and at the same time making it easier to do bad things without consequences. To evaluate the social good of our result, then, will involve the comparison of these positive and negative implications. This experience log is a very brief exploration into some research of the effects online anonymity can have on individuals..
First, the bad news. Anonymity in group environments in general has been shown to produce a nasty bystander effect, described before the conception of the internet in a psychology study by J. Darley in 1968[1], and this can lead people to develop apathy toward other humans behind the wall of technology. I have little doubt anyone reading this hasn’t seen an exceptionally cruel comment on some platform that was facilitated by an anonymous profile, and I myself can tend to act more coldly in online exchanges compared to in-person encounters. Additionally, another publication by C. Sia in 2002 observes how group polarization is more common in anonymous environments when compared to the alternative where individuals are identified[2]. Again, we can anecdotally validate these conclusions in our own lives; it’s not hard for an anonymous message board to devolve into a strongly polarized political discussion and we’ve all seen it happen in the YouTube comments. There are many more observed negative consequences of internet anonymity, and plenty more that are still undiscovered, but I focus on these two because of how easily I can personally relate to these. If all these negative elements added up outweigh the benefits of a de-anonymized Internet, then maybe our class project will just be an accomplice to a collection of online misdemeanors. I tend to be a little more optimistic after exploring the other half of the equation.
We’ve all heard the false equivalency of holding privacy as a value with the idea that you have something nefarious to hide from society. Indeed, if you have some opinions or tendencies that are looked down upon by many people then anonymity is precious, but it should be valued in a variety of other contexts. The paper that inspired this whole log is a 2003 study by J. Martin, ‘Loneliness and social uses of the Internet’[3]. This publication explicitly argues against a common idea that internet usage, especially anonymous activity, leads to increased loneliness in individuals. This idea is driven by the logic that as one engages more in online, ‘fake’ relationships, they spend less time developing ‘real’, in person relationships and become lonely as a result. This is not an unusual or unintuitive idea, but the results of Martin’s wide-scale survey of college undergraduates suggest otherwise. The in-person social life of students wasn’t significantly impacted by internet usage, and students found online activity as a refuge from their loneliness and anxieties. With reduced social pressure and social presence, users reported themselves to have a reduced sense of social anxiety and were able to communicate more freely and honestly. These results are duplicated by A. Joinson [4], who observed that anonymized environments lead to significantly lower social anxiety, and interestingly enough uniquely identified this as true in the internet compared to paper anonymity. A particularly anxious person could absolutely have nothing to ‘hide’, but just be worried about a spelling mistake tied back to their true identity. These changes in social behaviors produce an ironic result: the most honest communities in the internet can have the most obscured identities.
I find social protection against anxieties and loneliness a very compelling case for anonymity, and personally I’ve found myself a beneficiary of these positive elements more profoundly than a victim of the negative behaviors described above. I completely understand that this is not an absolute, however, and many people feel exactly the opposite. One study that I would love to see the results of could be to ask individuals whether or not they feel positively or negatively impacted overall by anonymous behaviors on the internet. Ideally, we’d be able to capture the good and prevent the bad, but I feel they might go hand in hand in a lot of ways.
[1]: Darley, John M., and Bibb Latané. “Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility.”
[2]: Sia, Choon-Ling, Bernard CY Tan, and Kwok-Kee Wei. “Group polarization and computer-mediated communication: Effects of communication cues, social presence, and anonymity.”
[3]: Morahan-Martin, Janet, and Phyllis Schumacher. “Loneliness and social uses of the Internet.”
[4]: Joinson, Adam. “Social desirability, anonymity, and Internet-based questionnaires.”
