“Sometimes young boys on Facebook send me rape threats, so I’ve started telling their mothers,” journalist Alanah Pearce tweeted.
Pearce, always getting rape threats on her articles and pieces, had decided to look up some of the commenters. She realized that a number of them were young boys, not even adults. Suddenly, the specific relationship and power dynamics between writer and commenter shifted. It clarified into a fairly routine interaction: child is rude to an adult, the parent intervenes, and the child gets into trouble and learns a lesson.
Anonymity has been one of the touted benefits of the internet for a long time now. Allowing for free and unfettered expression from individuals that may have never thought they could say something aloud. It’s allowed for protest and discourse in places that would have punished heavily for such actions.
However, it’s also removed the day-to-day consequences of social norms that regulate a safe society. Normally, you can’t just yell in a group of people, and expect no negative feedback to stop. Nor harass someone within their space 24 hours a day.
But with the internet as it is, you can. You can form limitless identities and accounts, and have access to people’s attention around the clock.
There’ll be a shift though. As we, all of us, are using the internet more-and-more and contributing and participating—it’s an ever-growing component of us, our lives, and our identities. We will have to start connecting our virtual selves closer to our physical selves. We will start needing both positive and negative feedback about our actions whether online or off.
In the process, we hope to eliminate the traditional biases that plague our current offline selves like bias against appearance or location or nationality. But that shouldn’t stop the need to remove a bit of anonymity to create a sustainable global community.
Dynamic Hypocrisy 