Why do we feel worse about something if a parental figure is berating us than if a stranger in the grocery store is? Why does the 12 year old in a video game get so much more insulting than if we were sitting next to each other? Well, we know the answers of most of the inputs, but let's talk about the one question I want focus on here: who knows who is who?
Anonymity and Pseudonymity
The internet isn't actually that different from real life socializing, there's just an added layer of a perception path that is a problem, but the issue of someone perceiving a person behind the avatar and someone perceiving themselves as identifying as their online persona are only useful if the rest is already available. People generally expect some modicum of professionalism on LinkedIn (for some reason) and this means it has less memes, but that just means you will get quite ostracized if you say anything too outside the norm. Is that caused by the fact that you are usually using your real name and work history on there? Not a perfect system, but enough to illustrate the point.
Honestly speaking, you are not your real name. You are the social reputation attached to that name. That's pseudonymity, where you have the opportunity to change your social presence at will. Online, I am TodPunk just about everywhere. I want to build association with that as a "brand" I suppose, but that modern reterming is really just the fact that I want to consistently carry a reputation with that name that is possibly related to my real name. It's easy to build the bridge between the two.
We blame a lot on anonymity on the internet. This is reasonable, because if you are anonymous, you don't factor in the social consequences nearly as much as you would if you were wearing a name tag plainly visible. However, it's not anonymity because nobody knows who you are, but anonymity because there's no identity to be had. Is JosieSmith1374928 anonymous? Yes. Is it because she's most likely a bot? No, and frankly it's confusingly close to the real reason: you can't have any context about the person.
Context of a Post
The internet lost a lot of value when we went to big social platforms. Small, tightly focused communities were a great combat to the problems of bots, because you had to create your bot account for such a small audience, the influence had to be specifically in a given topic or regional context, and people could tell you weren't real very quickly simply because you weren't participating in the relevant arena. The bot problem never even came up, though, so this wasn't to combat bots. We purely wanted to talk to other people. Even political discourse was like this, and easily avoided if you didn't want to have it.
The point was to keep the discourse of a certain quality. Without ever knowing it, we did so by combating anonymity.
It's interesting how we accidentally did that, because when you say something online, you don't tend to think of it like a quality level. You also don't think of it like an internet post. We all tend to think we're saying something, as someone, with a whole background. We don't tend to read such things if we don't have knowledge of the person online. Your coworker responding to you on whatever social media is not the same as a random stranger. The difference in context is interesting to me.
When we make a post online, it's really just a completely detached statement. Devoid of context, such a statement ia open to a lot of misinerpretations obviously.
How You Perceive
One time my friend was telling me about his girlfriend playing a game. It's a game where you have a character you create and you go through an adventure in the third person. The details aren't that important. She did start collecting every cheese she could find in a room of her house, which was very important for some reason. Anyway, the interesting thing here was how different they thought of when playing games. One of them thought they were the character, and the other thought the character was them.
Zelda is my favorite game series. When I play as Link, I am me, in Link as an avatar. I know of others that are separated, they're merely controlling Link, who is his own entity but is their puppet. Which of us is correct? I think the answer is meaningless in the general case. The point is that people see these differently. How do they view their social media accounts? How do they view their posts?
Options Availability
I find this endlessly interesting, but none of this is a problem. The problem is the lack of choice. In a video game, you can percieve your character however you want, and get the experience you want accordingly. All the pieces are there for you to combine into crafting your own engagement with the art.
Online, we don't have many options. Network effects are sadly real, and we all abandoned email socially for a host of very good reasons. The problem is the foundation we've built all this one means connecting with others is difficult. The only incentive is "likes" as they say, or other internet points to collect. Number go up or something. If you want to both validate if SparkyMcGeeJonesEsquire is a real person, and see what their background is, what are your options? Depends on the platform if you can even see what else that account has posted, let alone what anyone else thinks of them.
Anonymity has its place, and I don't think that's going to go away. We definitely want to keep spaces where anonymity is the norm. What we need is better pseudonimity options so we don't have to rely on conventions built on anonymity as the default. A better foundation, not a prescription.
Anyway, that's where my heads at on the subject this morning. What tools should we have for this? What do you think makes the best system? Where have you found the best online human connection take place? If you want to, join the Catalyst Community Discord and tell me.