By day, Igor is a gawky, timid wretch with no confidence and no social skills whatsoever. But on the Glittering Russian Dolls forum he becomes Incredible Ingrid, the incorrigible, immaculate Empress of the internet: an outgoing and popular participant in an abstract global drag scene. In his home city of Magnitogorsk there are few physical outlets for his interests; indeed, for someone as shy as Igor there are none. But online he can cast off the ill-fitting mantle of his daily life: the uncomfortable shrinking-violet suit in which he was born. He can be himself: a new self he has created in a fresh mental image. He can be Incredible Ingrid, and in that role he can know no fear!
Incredible Ingrid may or may not be a Glittering Russian Doll
such as the one pictured above (which smells of lavender).
such as the one pictured above (which smells of lavender).
Incredible Ingrid has not limited her online activities to Glittering Russian Dolls. In this persona, Igor has colonized the internet: @IncredibleIngrid's tweets entertain thousands daily; her blog is similarly well-read. Her YouTube account became so popular that it had to be deleted lest one of Igor's work colleagues should stumble upon it. You can even email ingrid@incredibleingrid.co.ru should you wish.
On Facebook you can find Ingrid Incredibleva, and the Google+ identity police have yet to catch up with an account of the same name on their books. Igor, on the other hand, is largely absent from the internet.
There are many reasons why we might wish to foster an anonymous identity online, not least that, in spite of its size, the internet that most of us use is an open place with very few hidey-holes. We humans behave differently in one social environment to how we behave in another: our work demeanour is not the same as our wild-night-out demeanour or the personality we present to our children or parents. For this reason, many people try to foster separate identities on the internet: a formal worklife presence on the likes of LinkedIn, a familial pose on Facebook, a cheekier aspect on Twitter...
On the internet there are few hiding places, but plenty
of pictures of Cary Grant being chased by a crop-duster.
If you try to keep this separation of intent while consistently using your own name, Google will undo all your hard work. A handle is required if one is to assume some control over ones identities, and to maintain some sense of anonymity. There is nothing underhand about wanting to manage the audience of any remarks you make: there is little opportunity to whisper on the internet: it's a terribly echoy place and everything you say can be heard by anyone who inclines an ear.
Google+ seems to follow the school of thought that anyone in a hood is up to no good. It is certainly true that, freed of the responsibilities placed upon us in real life by our social cages, the anonymous user may over-exercise their liberty to the point of offensiveness and abuse. My first experience of the web, in 1996, was as one of a number of drunken teenagers causing trouble in the Yahoo Village Pub chatroom; perhaps it is a rite of passage to feel out the boundaries of acceptable behaviour on the internet just as it is in childhood. But trolls hide behind but a tiny fraction of usernames, and the same principle that empowers someone to post goatse.cx on a forum also allows Igor to overcome his shyness and entertain thousands with wit and charm.
They say that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, usually before brutally torturing you. We all have something to hide, either from some future dystopian state with access to Google, or simply from those with whom we adopt a different social register. Mrs Goggins blogs about her impressive lingerie collection but would be mortified were Postman Pat ever to find out. It would add undue baggage to their professional relationship. Likewise, Miss Hubbard keeps private her obsessional fanaticism for East 17: she has an image to uphold and that would do it no good whatsoever. Just as a teacher may choose to maintain an almost supernatural detachment from her class, never revealing any personal details beyond title and surname, so the anonymous web user stays aloof from their public life.
The greatest problem we face in social circles is the crunching of gears that can take place when two of those circles collide: the uncomfortable situation of meeting your boss in a club, or the horror show that is taking a partner home to meet the parents. That's why, as I have discussed many times before, I operate two Twitter accounts, and keep my Facebook account largely at arm's length.
Google+ seems to follow the school of thought that anyone in a hood is up to no good. It is certainly true that, freed of the responsibilities placed upon us in real life by our social cages, the anonymous user may over-exercise their liberty to the point of offensiveness and abuse. My first experience of the web, in 1996, was as one of a number of drunken teenagers causing trouble in the Yahoo Village Pub chatroom; perhaps it is a rite of passage to feel out the boundaries of acceptable behaviour on the internet just as it is in childhood. But trolls hide behind but a tiny fraction of usernames, and the same principle that empowers someone to post goatse.cx on a forum also allows Igor to overcome his shyness and entertain thousands with wit and charm.
They say that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, usually before brutally torturing you. We all have something to hide, either from some future dystopian state with access to Google, or simply from those with whom we adopt a different social register. Mrs Goggins blogs about her impressive lingerie collection but would be mortified were Postman Pat ever to find out. It would add undue baggage to their professional relationship. Likewise, Miss Hubbard keeps private her obsessional fanaticism for East 17: she has an image to uphold and that would do it no good whatsoever. Just as a teacher may choose to maintain an almost supernatural detachment from her class, never revealing any personal details beyond title and surname, so the anonymous web user stays aloof from their public life.
Miss Hubbard throwing some shapes to "Steam" while nobody is looking.
The greatest problem we face in social circles is the crunching of gears that can take place when two of those circles collide: the uncomfortable situation of meeting your boss in a club, or the horror show that is taking a partner home to meet the parents. That's why, as I have discussed many times before, I operate two Twitter accounts, and keep my Facebook account largely at arm's length.
It's also why I'm very dismayed by the latest move at my favourite subscription library: Spotify. Keen to exploit the publicity power of the Facebook wall, they're now insisting that new users sign in with a Facebook account. Of course, you could quite easily set up a sham Facebook account for the purpose, but that would be a breach of Facebook's terms and conditions, and you'd run the risk of having your account (and hence perhaps your access to Spotify) rescinded. The principle at play here is a worrying one, especially in the wake of the Google+ daftness. It's the sort of thing that deserves to be treated with contempt, like Facebook's policy before it.
The great novelty of Google+ was the Circles model, but if you want to address multiple audiences, all you really need is multiple accounts. There's no limit to the number of Facebook or Twitter accounts you can have (save, perhaps, the number of email addresses you can procure), and all can easily be managed using third-party clients like Seesmic. Now Facebook can handle circles too, Google+ resembles more and more the same sort of desert in which we earlier met Cary Grant.
What does any of this have to do with CPD23? It is the social media landscape: a masquerade ball. Irrespective of how many personae we present to the world, and the liberation we may feel in so doing, these characters are still held within a social framework, albeit perhaps held in a more comfortable embrace. Incredible Ingrid exists as a real entity, bound by reputation, and by the mores of the social media she frequents. Were Ingrid to play the troll, she would soon find herself ostracised by her peers. Were she to employ the other old forum no-no of sock-puppetry: the creation of a second account to lend assent to the arguments of the first, people would likely come to notice (as they have on so many forums in the past), and Ingrid's credibility would be left in tatters. Such social checks and balances exist within the virtual environment just as they do in the physical realm.
Wikipedia makes for an interesting case study. Back in my day, most passing vandalism was conducted by nameless IP addresses thrilled by the freedom the project offered: "You mean, I can write PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS all over the entry for Bob Carolgees? Wow!: PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS!" It's quite a rush one gets, I'm sure, and also very easy to spot and revert. The more troublesome vandals, those whose amusement was to change dates and insert carefully masked untruths, almost always had a username. This is slightly strange, given that it, too, made their actions easy to unpick once their miscreancy had been spotted, but in a way meant that they could slip under the radar a touch, if only for a moment: the assumption that anonymous users would cause the trouble protected many a naughtiness from being noticed.
Such characters gained themselves reputations, and, ultimately, bans. They would reappear under new monikers and the circle would turn again. Trolls can be truly tenacious creatures, and troll hunting can prove arduous sport. But all liberty can be abused: such is the price of freedom. The cost of that most prized of liberties, freedom of speech, is that people are free to say all sorts of shit which one must grin and bear. But such individuals are, usually, in a minority. Most people out there in online society are decent types, although they may not necessarily agree with you. A curious phenomenon oft observed on Twitter and Facebook is the 'unfollow' / 'unfriend'. At some point you begin to follow somebody, presumably because they said something or did something of which you approved or agreed, and then at some point later they say something with which you do not agree (perhaps something which even offends you) and you remove them from your feed.
This is all well and good if one treats the feed as a form of entertainment: other users are performing jesters placed there for our pleasure (dance for me or I will turn my attentions elsewhere!). But if our feed is to genuinely be a representative social community (in the way that, say, a forum may potentially be), a certain tolerance is required. Some views are hard to stomach, of course, and some are downright unpleasant. A little discrimination in the friends we choose is inevitable, as it is in the real world. It may be that in the balance of things, the 'offensive' posts outstrip the 'assenting' or 'amusing' to such an extent that a user is rendered intolerable. But tolerance operates on both sides. A user who actively divorces themself from opinion other than their own cannot realistically be described as tolerant. Rather, they are sheltered. I type from a liberal perspective, from which I have observed several who appear to genuinely believe that The Guardian represents some sort of middle ground or normative opinion. I would love that this were true, but it demonstrably is not. Such people exist within a bubble, and this self-imposed ghettoization occurs with a particular frequency on Twitter (moreso than Facebook, whose old-schoolfriend model may lend a degree more patience).
I am not trying to say that one should sit there tolerating the intolerant, or that those embarking on an approach of comfortable isolation from opinions they dislike are necessarily wrong to do so. Rather I am attempting to illustrate that some online social realms are communes and not (as some of their membership may believe) representative microcosms of the wider world. The Glittering Russian Dolls forum specifically caters to a single-issue interest group: while their broader outlook and politics may vary, the majority of its users are cross-dressing Russians of one form or another. The modern social networks can pride themselves on a potentially wider scope of interests than a single-issue forum, but may end up limiting themselves on the opposite axis: the core interests may vary while the outlook and politics fix.
These two axes will limit the size and variation within our online society. We may be both topically and socially specific: "27-year-old Vegan Librarians for the Monster Raving Loonies in Basildon"; we may even be utterly liberal on both counts and befriend everybody we come across. More likely, we will have to balance the two scales in search of a happy medium.
The power to sanitize our physical environments of conversational flash-points is largely lacking in the fleshier reality, though many a nascent social community will attempt to embargo talk of politics or religion lest it escalate into thermonuclear war (or at the very least a duel of noughts and crosses). But online, not only can we assume an ideal face, relinquishing the baggage we have to lug around in the real world; we can also prance about in an ideal community where everyone agrees with us and there is never discord.
Dawkins takes on the Vatican's new supercomputer
in a testy game of Global Theological Debate.
Let's try to tether this thing down again before it drifts into a rant about management intransigence. For a society, be it on Earth or in Cyberspace, to be anything other than a police-state, it must be tolerant of ideas and actions of which it does not approve. It can condemn such actions, it can question them or stand aloof from them, but it should not completely ignore them or deny their existence, sticking its fingers in its ears and singing "la-la-la". Ideally it should engage with them, though this can be arduous and far from fun, and will all too often ignite into a flame war as passion trumps empathy. But an effective society must face its demons, not hide from them behind the settee of a silencing 'unfollow'. In a truly free society, any member is allowed to talk shit, and any other member is allowed to listen to that shit and decide how shit it is. There is no censorship. Some coprophages in our society may swallow the shit gleefully, which is a shame, but then it is the rest of society's job to educate those poor individuals in the nutritional failings and potential health-risks inherent in said shit.
This is all speculative philosophy, and quite what it has to do with the pockets of librarians that exist online I'm not entirely sure. We're all a lovely lot, after all, and despite certain rumours of cliquedom, the librarians of Twitter are undeniably welcoming of anyone willing to associate with them. But should discord ever strike in our virtual stacks, what strategies might we employ to overcome it?
When two minds meet online, the difference between their respective perspectives has the potential to be proportionally as great as the geographical distance involved: the internet is the greatest mass long-distance communication device ever developed; pen-pals were never so sociable. This just adds to the mix of philosophies, and the soup of shared experience found online. But as communities merge, certain absolute values are found to be less absolute than was believed to be the case. At Wikipedia (an exquisite example of the commune made microcosmic good) a certain naïvety was revealed in the aspiration to the NPOV. It was all too quickly discovered that the neutrality as perceived by one individual was different to the neutrality as perceived by another (any articles relating to the Irish or Palestinian 'Questions' offer excellent examples of this, but the problem is broader than territorial politics). This classic infographic charts some of the more fiercely fought Edit Wars in Wikipedia's brief and violent history, and indicates that it wasn't just on the location of neutrality where cultures clashed (see also [[Wikipedia: Lamest edit wars]]). Many such battles would stretch on indefinitely were it not for interventions. But while some disputes would face the lock of arbitration, others could be inventively resolved. My favourite case was [[Football]]: With so many nations using the term to mean different games, much energy was devoted to the question of what should occupy the page: common sense might suggest we duck the issue and just have the page as a disambiguation, but the Association crowd felt passionately that they were rightful owners of the term, which would ire the Americans, and cause splutters of derision from the Rugby fans. After some discussion a glorious compromise was reached: the page should be a genealogical history of all the Footballs. Consider this masterful opening paragraph:
The great novelty of Google+ was the Circles model, but if you want to address multiple audiences, all you really need is multiple accounts. There's no limit to the number of Facebook or Twitter accounts you can have (save, perhaps, the number of email addresses you can procure), and all can easily be managed using third-party clients like Seesmic. Now Facebook can handle circles too, Google+ resembles more and more the same sort of desert in which we earlier met Cary Grant.
My own "crunching gears", from Showing Some Leg.
What does any of this have to do with CPD23? It is the social media landscape: a masquerade ball. Irrespective of how many personae we present to the world, and the liberation we may feel in so doing, these characters are still held within a social framework, albeit perhaps held in a more comfortable embrace. Incredible Ingrid exists as a real entity, bound by reputation, and by the mores of the social media she frequents. Were Ingrid to play the troll, she would soon find herself ostracised by her peers. Were she to employ the other old forum no-no of sock-puppetry: the creation of a second account to lend assent to the arguments of the first, people would likely come to notice (as they have on so many forums in the past), and Ingrid's credibility would be left in tatters. Such social checks and balances exist within the virtual environment just as they do in the physical realm.
Wikipedia makes for an interesting case study. Back in my day, most passing vandalism was conducted by nameless IP addresses thrilled by the freedom the project offered: "You mean, I can write PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS all over the entry for Bob Carolgees? Wow!: PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS PISS!" It's quite a rush one gets, I'm sure, and also very easy to spot and revert. The more troublesome vandals, those whose amusement was to change dates and insert carefully masked untruths, almost always had a username. This is slightly strange, given that it, too, made their actions easy to unpick once their miscreancy had been spotted, but in a way meant that they could slip under the radar a touch, if only for a moment: the assumption that anonymous users would cause the trouble protected many a naughtiness from being noticed.
Pissing on the internet.
Such characters gained themselves reputations, and, ultimately, bans. They would reappear under new monikers and the circle would turn again. Trolls can be truly tenacious creatures, and troll hunting can prove arduous sport. But all liberty can be abused: such is the price of freedom. The cost of that most prized of liberties, freedom of speech, is that people are free to say all sorts of shit which one must grin and bear. But such individuals are, usually, in a minority. Most people out there in online society are decent types, although they may not necessarily agree with you. A curious phenomenon oft observed on Twitter and Facebook is the 'unfollow' / 'unfriend'. At some point you begin to follow somebody, presumably because they said something or did something of which you approved or agreed, and then at some point later they say something with which you do not agree (perhaps something which even offends you) and you remove them from your feed.
This is all well and good if one treats the feed as a form of entertainment: other users are performing jesters placed there for our pleasure (dance for me or I will turn my attentions elsewhere!). But if our feed is to genuinely be a representative social community (in the way that, say, a forum may potentially be), a certain tolerance is required. Some views are hard to stomach, of course, and some are downright unpleasant. A little discrimination in the friends we choose is inevitable, as it is in the real world. It may be that in the balance of things, the 'offensive' posts outstrip the 'assenting' or 'amusing' to such an extent that a user is rendered intolerable. But tolerance operates on both sides. A user who actively divorces themself from opinion other than their own cannot realistically be described as tolerant. Rather, they are sheltered. I type from a liberal perspective, from which I have observed several who appear to genuinely believe that The Guardian represents some sort of middle ground or normative opinion. I would love that this were true, but it demonstrably is not. Such people exist within a bubble, and this self-imposed ghettoization occurs with a particular frequency on Twitter (moreso than Facebook, whose old-schoolfriend model may lend a degree more patience).
I am not trying to say that one should sit there tolerating the intolerant, or that those embarking on an approach of comfortable isolation from opinions they dislike are necessarily wrong to do so. Rather I am attempting to illustrate that some online social realms are communes and not (as some of their membership may believe) representative microcosms of the wider world. The Glittering Russian Dolls forum specifically caters to a single-issue interest group: while their broader outlook and politics may vary, the majority of its users are cross-dressing Russians of one form or another. The modern social networks can pride themselves on a potentially wider scope of interests than a single-issue forum, but may end up limiting themselves on the opposite axis: the core interests may vary while the outlook and politics fix.
These two axes will limit the size and variation within our online society. We may be both topically and socially specific: "27-year-old Vegan Librarians for the Monster Raving Loonies in Basildon"; we may even be utterly liberal on both counts and befriend everybody we come across. More likely, we will have to balance the two scales in search of a happy medium.
"A happy medium."
The power to sanitize our physical environments of conversational flash-points is largely lacking in the fleshier reality, though many a nascent social community will attempt to embargo talk of politics or religion lest it escalate into thermonuclear war (or at the very least a duel of noughts and crosses). But online, not only can we assume an ideal face, relinquishing the baggage we have to lug around in the real world; we can also prance about in an ideal community where everyone agrees with us and there is never discord.
in a testy game of Global Theological Debate.
The problem with such closed communities is that they are sheltered not only from the grimmer reality but also from arguments that may advance their own position. The King who knows nothing but the yea-saying of his courtesans knows nothing indeed. The peasants storming the Royal Palace are presumably doing so to express their love for him all the closer. The perfect isolation is a denial of a grimmer imperfect world and is not necessarily a healthy approach.
A similar state of affairs exists in the physical workplace: not least the old cliché (all too often in place) of a management structure that refuses to heed the advice of its workforce, or that other oft-seen tragedy of the blinkered organization, unaware of rival innovations. Other points of view may be inconvenient but they exist, and will ultimately have to be negotiated. As hard as it may be to accept, they might also, on occasion, be right.
A not uncontroversial model for dealing with terminal illness.
Also patronizingly employed by managers who wish to
demean the contributions and concerns of their employees.
Also patronizingly employed by managers who wish to
demean the contributions and concerns of their employees.
Let's try to tether this thing down again before it drifts into a rant about management intransigence. For a society, be it on Earth or in Cyberspace, to be anything other than a police-state, it must be tolerant of ideas and actions of which it does not approve. It can condemn such actions, it can question them or stand aloof from them, but it should not completely ignore them or deny their existence, sticking its fingers in its ears and singing "la-la-la". Ideally it should engage with them, though this can be arduous and far from fun, and will all too often ignite into a flame war as passion trumps empathy. But an effective society must face its demons, not hide from them behind the settee of a silencing 'unfollow'. In a truly free society, any member is allowed to talk shit, and any other member is allowed to listen to that shit and decide how shit it is. There is no censorship. Some coprophages in our society may swallow the shit gleefully, which is a shame, but then it is the rest of society's job to educate those poor individuals in the nutritional failings and potential health-risks inherent in said shit.
This is all speculative philosophy, and quite what it has to do with the pockets of librarians that exist online I'm not entirely sure. We're all a lovely lot, after all, and despite certain rumours of cliquedom, the librarians of Twitter are undeniably welcoming of anyone willing to associate with them. But should discord ever strike in our virtual stacks, what strategies might we employ to overcome it?
When two minds meet online, the difference between their respective perspectives has the potential to be proportionally as great as the geographical distance involved: the internet is the greatest mass long-distance communication device ever developed; pen-pals were never so sociable. This just adds to the mix of philosophies, and the soup of shared experience found online. But as communities merge, certain absolute values are found to be less absolute than was believed to be the case. At Wikipedia (an exquisite example of the commune made microcosmic good) a certain naïvety was revealed in the aspiration to the NPOV. It was all too quickly discovered that the neutrality as perceived by one individual was different to the neutrality as perceived by another (any articles relating to the Irish or Palestinian 'Questions' offer excellent examples of this, but the problem is broader than territorial politics). This classic infographic charts some of the more fiercely fought Edit Wars in Wikipedia's brief and violent history, and indicates that it wasn't just on the location of neutrality where cultures clashed (see also [[Wikipedia: Lamest edit wars]]). Many such battles would stretch on indefinitely were it not for interventions. But while some disputes would face the lock of arbitration, others could be inventively resolved. My favourite case was [[Football]]: With so many nations using the term to mean different games, much energy was devoted to the question of what should occupy the page: common sense might suggest we duck the issue and just have the page as a disambiguation, but the Association crowd felt passionately that they were rightful owners of the term, which would ire the Americans, and cause splutters of derision from the Rugby fans. After some discussion a glorious compromise was reached: the page should be a genealogical history of all the Footballs. Consider this masterful opening paragraph:
Football may refer to one of a number of team sports which all involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball with the foot to score a goal. The most popular of these sports worldwide is association football, more commonly known as just "football" or "soccer". Unqualified, the word football applies to whichever form of football is the most popular in the regional context in which the word appears, including American football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, rugby league, rugby union and other related games. These variations of football are known as football "codes".
That's the sort of thing of which society is capable if it puts its mind to it.
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