Social theorists and sci-fi writers predicted the internet would give citizens the chance to be simultaneously anonymous and heard world-round on everything from political issues to gardening techniques (see Enders Game). Those predictions, however, have not come true as cleanly as theories claimed.
The internet, by its very structure, requires identification of the source and recipient of information: packets must be routed somewhere. That temporary identification leaves a footprint which could be followed, if anyone (government or individual) had reason to follow it (for example, the RIAA has won the right to subpoena individual users’ personal information from ISPs without a judge’s order).
My thesis will be that the true anonymity of the internet isn’t the ability to do actions or say things which can never be traced back to you, because that anonymity is decaying rapidly and may have never truly existed in the first place. Instead anonymity is found in the common user’s ability to create any persona he’d like on the net, and in other users’ quick acceptance of that persona as the truth.
My blog will follow cases, judicial decisions, laws, and commentary discussing the break-down of the users’ ability to create his own net persona (for example, the failed addition of a publicly visible personal unique ID (UID) into Microsoft Office products by Microsoft, which would have made creating a persona pointless—anyone could simply cross reference your UID to find that you’re a 23-year-old CS major with an axe to grind).
And so here begins the semester.
The internet, by its very structure, requires identification of the source and recipient of information: packets must be routed somewhere. That temporary identification leaves a footprint which could be followed, if anyone (government or individual) had reason to follow it (for example, the RIAA has won the right to subpoena individual users’ personal information from ISPs without a judge’s order).
My thesis will be that the true anonymity of the internet isn’t the ability to do actions or say things which can never be traced back to you, because that anonymity is decaying rapidly and may have never truly existed in the first place. Instead anonymity is found in the common user’s ability to create any persona he’d like on the net, and in other users’ quick acceptance of that persona as the truth.
My blog will follow cases, judicial decisions, laws, and commentary discussing the break-down of the users’ ability to create his own net persona (for example, the failed addition of a publicly visible personal unique ID (UID) into Microsoft Office products by Microsoft, which would have made creating a persona pointless—anyone could simply cross reference your UID to find that you’re a 23-year-old CS major with an axe to grind).
And so here begins the semester.
posted by robert at
8:52 AM
