Saturday, September 12, 2009
What’s happening to our online communities?
Supriya Thanawala of the Hindustan Times wrote in asking if I had noticed how online community spaces over the years have grown to discourage pseudo-anonymous identities. I responded noting several trend lines:
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Internet adoption is growing, making governments increasingly more conscious that this is a new space they ought to be governing. That’s where the cyber cells and ISP IP logging come from.
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Any medium where an individual can be reached with little effort will be misused. Postal mail has junk marketing, telephones have telemarketers, email has spam, each cheaper than the previous. As the medium grows and becomes a worthwhile channel for junk messages, service providers come under increasing pressure to keep it usable for normal users. They do this by either requiring some real life id (such as by your ISP) or by limiting your use of the service (such as mailing list providers that limit the number of people you can directly add to your new list).
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The web is a public medium. Anybody can see anything posted there. The web is also very large, so resource discovery, and not access, becomes of primary importance. Blogging became popular because of this curious nature of the web. A blog was both private because nobody would find it until they got referred to it somehow, and public because you could always share the link. Online spaces felt like intimate communities in the early days because there were so few people online and you either knew who they were, or guessing that became an interesting game. As that count grew, partitioning spaces becomes important. Today’s Facebook is more or less private. You decide who your friends are and only they can see what you write. The rest of the web can’t.
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Early blog+social networking spaces like LiveJournal and Friendster have been grappling with anonymity and fake identities for long. Here’s something I wrote a few years ago. Some have attempted banning them outright, while others have tolerated them but ended up with mixed results (see this for a particularly entertaining example – those profiles originated in a very non-funny flamefest elsewhere, after which their makers decided to keep them going for a while). Facebook has taken the more pragmatic approach, allowing for the creation of “pages” distinct from profiles that users can interact with.
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Facebook arrives at a time when the web is increasingly seen as having little direct revenue value. Money is made via advertising, not from users paying up (in contrast, LiveJournal was profitable for several years because users paid for accounts with extra features; Flickr runs on the same model). The Pages feature on Facebook is largely seen as a marketing vehicle for a film or a product that users pay for off the web. This brings in marketing language, sanitised humour when there is any (notice that TV sitcoms are never as funny as the spontaneous writing of the Aaj Sholay community), and a referral to everything by a real world name in a manner that respects trademarks and copyrights.
So where is all the anonymity and creativity going now? It exists as always; it’s just out seeking new corners for itself away from the public eye.
(I suspect some of this isn’t quite true anymore, but I haven’t been thinking about it. Your thoughts?)
