Anonymity is Suspicious

Anonymity No More: In the good old days, a new acquaintence was pretty much a blank slate. Today we are all expected to be searchable, reachable, and visible online. Googling each other is practically a national pastime. Thanks to social media, that means trolling through their tweets, perusing their Facebook photos and more. As Jenna Wortham points out, it’s gotten to the point that we are almost suspicious of people whom we can’t find out about on the Internet, people who haven’t left any traces of themselves online. It’s sad that this is what we are moving towards, a world in which online ubiquity is almost a must. More power to those who have the courage to opt out of the social media rat race. NYT

Facebook Makes us Boring?: One of the guys over at Meeps (“a spontaneous network that reacts to what’s on your mind, rather than you reacting to what your friends and followers post”) posted on the company blog about how he thinks Facebook has made us “dreadfully *meh*.” He clarifies that it’s not that we are actually boring, but that we end up presenting more boring versions of ourselves on FB because we feel we need to edit ourselves so as not to stir up trouble or bring embarrassment upon ourselves. While I agree with his point about self-editing, I don’t think that it always results in the presentation of watered-down versions of ourselves; I think it’s often the opposite, in fact. I think that people often over-embellish their online personas (add crazy party pics, share funny links and videos, post status updates about a new must-listen band, etc) in an effort to seem cooler, smarter, more social, more x, y, and z than they are in real life. meeps

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