Michael Kinsley has this amusing piece over at Slate on how the Internet, which was supposed to be the vast bastion of anonymity, has fostered a culture where so many people feel the need to reveal so much about themselves.
Anonymity, for better or for worse, is supposed to be one of the signature qualities of the Web. As that dog in The New Yorker cartoon famously says, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The Internet is a place where you can interact with other people and have complete control over how much they know about you. Or supposedly that is the case, and virtually everybody on the Internet is committed to achieving that goal.
But, as Kinsley points out, anonymity has given way to full disclosure, with social networking sites, blogs and personal web pages offering up profound and mundane details about their authors.
The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you’re a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.
The intense focus on personal detail reaches its apex, perhaps, in Twitter.com, which allows users to tell the world what they’re doing right now.
For the ultimate in solipsism, check out Twitter.com, a site where—once you register—you can answer the question, “What are you doing?” At 7:47 a.m. on Monday, for example, Lynda was going to get a glass of cold water.
This raises more questions than it answers. Did she get it? Was it cold enough? Tragically, we’ll never know until someone starts a site about what you were doing before what you’re doing now.
Cynthia Brumfield at 3:07 PM|Comments(0)
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