Touching base with an old acquaintance is all about catching up. If I haven’t talked to someone in 20 years, the level of detail I’d like to see is what you typically see in letters from a family that accompany their holiday cards. Let me see a photo, how many kids do you have, what trips did you recently take, where are you working, how is everyone doing, and that’s about all I want to know for the next 20 years. But on Facebook I only have the option of adding an old acquaintance as a friend or denying them, and then I am met with daily updates on their daughter’s ballet classes, photos from their workplace, and who they think should win the big game tonight, forever. I kind of wish I could just see a person’s About page for five minutes and move on, as I don’t need the daily detail/updates of every old high school buddy’s life.

In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company’s site. This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.

….deindividuation is as much about anonymity of the self as it is about anonymity of the victim of the abuse; the belief that one need not face the consequences for his or her uncivil actions plays a major role. Does this suggest that people are not so inherently good as I have argued? Perhaps, or perhaps self-anonymity is connected with a perceived anonymity of the other. Just because you see the ref and know he is a person does not mean you see him as anything more than stripes. You don’t know who he is outside of that set of circumstances. Whether the cause is the concealment of one’s own identity or the concealment of the target’s identity, however, is irrelevant. The fact remains that the problem happens and it is the result of anonymity.