In Which the Anonymity of the Internet is Fleetingly Considered

I was briefly determined to update this blog every weekday this week, but yesterday it looked like I wasn’t going to have a chance. Fortunately (in this respect) for me, when I happened to have 10 minutes of internet yesterday afternoon I found that someone had written a comment on Sunday’s post, such that I was able to make quota at the same time as trying to clarify that taking this blog seriously is essentially pointless. Isn’t that nice? For those of you curious about this, the whole kerfuffle is to be found in the comments (and text, I suppose, to be fair) of the blog post 3 below this, “In Which Expectations are Not so much Great as Mildly Unhinged”.

I have been told by a startling number of people (‘startling’ because holy crap, seriously? There are that many of you with nothing better to do than read this bollocks?) that ‘what I ought to do is stand my ground and fight it out because it’s my blog and it’s important to think critically about everything - even and especially things which are done more or less selflessly for the greater good -, and what exactly is the value of “awareness” per se anyway?’ Which is awfully nice and supportive and so on, but not strictly relevant since I wasn’t trying to do any of those things at all. I promise all of you friends who have my best interests at heart that if I’d ever actually meant to take a strong position in a blog post, I’d defend it staunchly, not back down in this craven-looking manner. Let those who doubt this find and take issue with that post about gay marriage or whatever it was last year and then you’ll see a position defended.

Anyway, what’s intriguing here is the function of internet anonymity in this thrilling drama. I realise that since about - ooh, 1998? - this has been the most hackneyed and clichéd subject imaginable, but there you go. In what can only be described as a disturbing turn of phrase, one of these anonymous comments kindly hopes that I have “learned my lesson about public blogging” and promises that “we’ll be watching” which weirds me out to more or less the degree which must have been intended. The only solutions to this sort of thing are to either take it like a man and deal with it maturely or to become so irrelevant and tangential that the hypothetical watchers tire of the whole thing. Since this is how I write anyway, and since the more adult path has never yet come to be the one I’ve preferred, I’m going with option 2, which means that a clichéd and hackneyed post about the anonymity of the internet and its effect on “kids these days” can only be to the good.

Mounting paranoia aside, it’s a strange thing, anonymity; the Dutch Courage of the internet. Drunk on our theoretical inability to be “traced” or held accountable, we say things in ways which we never normally would. Whole theories of human interaction have been built around this. Most famous, of course, is Godwin’s Law, with which I trust you are all familiar (although if people are reading this week in a spirit of keeping an eye on such my outrageous political ideas then maybe the demographic is shifted unusually). Godwin’s Law, then, states that as the length of a conversation or argument on the internet (and the effect of this anonymity and us not bothering to keep our behaviour to our normal levels of reasonableness is that conversations inevitably tend towards argumentativeness) increases, the likelihood of someone being compared to Hitler or the Nazis approaches infinity. Or words to that effect.

Why is this? Are we, in our face-to-face interactions, just constantly keeping our fury in check? Surely not. I pretty much like everyone I hang out with, most of the time. Sure, everyone has occasional grumpy moments, but for the sake of our friendships, we keep things more or less under control, usually. This still holds for internet interactions where we our identities are unhidden. So Facebook isn’t the seething swarm of flamewars that any ordinary internet forum of that size would be. This allows us to deduce that the internet is not necessary-and-sufficient for us to behave like jerks (I’m talking generally, here, not calling anyone who reads my blog a jerk, because obviously anyone with such good taste would have to be charming). It looks like anonymity is the sine qua non of this sort of behaviour.

But surely if given the chance to do small and spiteful things anonymously in real life to the people whom we don’t much like, most of us would not do so? It would be so easy to play small malicious pranks on people in an untraceable fashion, but since Year 7, that sort of behaviour is certainly not de rigeur.

So what is it about this magical combination of anonymity and the internet? Presumably it’s the fact that we’re another step removed from our actions. We don’t actually see the effects of our words, which seem so ephemeral and harmless, and which allow us a luxurious degree of plausible deniability if we feel guilty and take ourselves to task. We can tell ourselves that we never thought that kid next door would actually kill herself, we just wanted to punish her a little bit. (Also, whoa, let’s not even get involved in thinking about the wackiness of that case. Those crazy Americans.) (Heh, Microsoft has underlined the phrase “those crazy Americans” as being wrong. Nice one Microsoft, leave your ideological baggage out of this, verb or no verb. Also, not honestly sure that that was actually in America but checking when I don’t have internet access is much too hard).

In the case of this blog, however, it’s different again, since the anonymity is one sided. My identity is open, I use my real name and link (foolishly, it has become clear) to this blog on my Facebook account. I did wonder about the wisdom of this when I put that link up, all that time ago, but at the time I’d barely blogged in years. When I first started the blog (by accident, hence the name) I only wanted to be able to use it to keep in touch with my school friends, since that was back in the era before Social Networking was a thing. I’ve never taken down that link mainly on the grounds that (a) I can’t be bothered, and it’s never seemed like it might matter, since who could possibly be interested other than people who like me anyway? and (b) vanity is my besetting sin.

Conversely, since I (again foolishly) decided to allow Anonymous commenting on my blog, this means that the people I’m dealing with are coming from a comparatively “safer” place of anonymity (note: I’m going to leave that facility enabled for a few days so that everything can get worked out, but then I’m turning that function off so hard, so if you wish to add your 2 cents without getting a blogger account, time is money at this point); this is rather like standing in a spotlight in a darkened room and having people throw things at you from the shadows.

It would be undiplomatic to enter into the question of whether it is “cowardly” to deliberately remain anonymous in such a situation, but it has traditionally been considered so, with what justification I cannot say, having never really felt it incumbent on myself to do much anonymously at all. Clearly, the original commenter would probably be exempt from any such criticism anyway, since we will charitably assume that it simply failed to occur to them that their input would be anonymous, robbing their opinion of a great deal of otherwise well-earned weight. Let us pass serenely over the people who actually signed “Anonymous” after this was pointed out, and let us especially avoid addressing the issue of how much the inequity is exacerbated by addressing me by name in their post.

What particularly intrigues me is that there are presently 3 comments which would appear to be from Med students on the blog, only one of which, at a stretch, might be likely to have been written by any of the Med students to whom I have mentioned having a blog. I realise that I mentioned the obscene word count in a Facebook status, but I’m surprised that this would prompt anyone to seek it out and read it. This is especially relevant since the first comment reads like it was written by someone involved in the event-organising, but the only Facebook-friend I have who I’m aware of having been at all involved doesn’t strike me as being likely to take stupid things like my blogging, or herself, quite as seriously as it would appear to have been taken (also, I’m almost sure that I’d already talked to her about the idea of handing out condoms at such an event being amusing, as, indeed, it can surely only have been meant to be). Especially the point that I should “try not to offend people” interests me, since writing a barely-relevant comment in amongst a thousand words of self-deprecating blather on a blog no-one involved could be supposed to be likely to read hardly seems to me like going out of my way to slap people in the face (although, obviously, yes, it’s a public blog and the material on it ought to be tailored to that understanding).

More to the point; 3 comments, all purporting to be from different people? This means that either three or more Med people (Med people reasonably heavily engaged with the clique which organised the event, so not the 2 which would have seemed reasonably likely) read my blog but have never mentioned it to me, which seems unlikely, or that one such person read it (which still seems unlikely, but which it seems to me that we must inevitably deduce was the case) and then forwarded it to the others. Which leaves us with people whom I barely know reading it, and which also brings us back again to the topic of last week - the oddness of being the subject of discussion and consideration in one's absence. What a strange impression this blog would give if this was all one knew of me apart from having seen me from a distance in lectures!

Whoa, this post is apparently now 1,770 words long. Obviously it is time to bring this rambling to an end, and the more so since I am sceptical as to anyone’s having read this far anyway. Have a nice day, cats and kittens, and if anything I’ve said has offended you today, but could b read in two ways (eg, one sarcastic, one merely alliterative, like the original post), let’s take it as read that I meant it in the inoffensive sense.