Being online and a member of the “web community” for almost 15 years, I am no longer appreciating the anonymity the web used to afford me. There was a time where I reveled in random postings under random names on random websites. I would go by HapE, or bribri, or any of a few dozen other aliases, if I felt like doing something new. I once had 17 email addresss all forwarding to each other, just so I never had to the same email address to someone twice.
After so many years of that, I realize the importance of the internet as a tool of informaiton. I search online for something that used to be a phonebook away. I look for business hours on a page, and don’t bother to call a store. I read the news online and gather notes for my homework online. Even though wikipedia by design can never be a reputable or credible source, I find a lot of information from there.
In addition to finding information online I have had a web page in one incarnation or another since 1996. I strived very hard for a long time to have no actual linkage of my life in reality to my life in cyberspace. I have googled myself for a few years now and generally removed or altered any reference to my personal data as I best as I could. The process of cleaning up information about yourself is very tedious. If I don’t include drunken parties with friends, I have done a few things on the Internet which have my name on them. I’m sure everyone has done something that is now on the Internet, either for good or bad. I am starting to realize the combination of having yourself in dozens of places on the Internet, using dozens of names, is far more arduous than necessary.
In vein with this topic I believe is the increase in ubiquitous computing that Nicholas Negroponte spoke of in his book “Being Digital.” I do recognize that unlike his book, my toaster isn’t speaking to my fridge telling it to email me and let me know I need more english muffins. The number of sites I have personal data on is growing every few weeks. I will post something on a new site and like every other site on the Internet, I am asked to fill out a profile. If you have been reading any of this blog or looked at the photos on TheBoobieHatch, you were asked to fill out a profile when you signed up. Not only does every site I ever visit have personal information on me, but it is the same information that is available to every other site as well. I don’t see the requirements for filling out profiles going away any time in the future. What I do see happening is a lot of the content which is accessible via one site, is becoming available to other sites, through the use of plugins and applications. As an example I have started setting up a plugin on this site which will display what Netflix rental I have at home. This data was always available to me before this plugin, but required too much human intervention to keep it updated correctly and frequently. This is similar to the Myspace Crossposter that is installed on here, that instantly posts a new blog entry on Myspace once I have published a blog here.
With this level of automation available for distributing my own contribution to the Internet, I question the anonymity that so many people still find valuable on the Internet today. What if your perspective employer hires a search firm to track things down about you on the Internet? What if all they found were articles, papers, and professional postings that you have added to the intelligence of the Internet community? What would this employer do if they found out you were a respected mind in your field, and they didn’t know it? What if they have actually been reading your site for some time now, but had no idea it was you, simply because your name on the website was Dr. Anonymous? All of your hard work and interest in providing decent and consumable content has been jeopardized due to a lack of credibility behind it.
That same credibility you would expect if a submission you made to a peer-reviewed journal should be implicit on the Internet. By not identifying yourself on a post or article, you will have a voice like every other individual who has posted on that same page. But what truly differentiates your voice from those other voices around you? If you make a striking argument on a site, who will people actually know who you are? How do they know your credible enough to actually add your influence to a discussion?
The Internet will always exist as a tool of mass anonymous information. I believe with technology continuing to allow us to blog from more places, check our Myspace page from our Facebook page, pull movie titles, and pingback to ourselves, the Internet has begun to diverge from the path of anonymous information, and is evolving into the largest and most widescale peer-reviewed journal that will ever exist.