Comment by neoveller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neoveller | Hacker News Reader

After reading and responding to the comments, I want to add an overall, more clear message:

The argument is that without rigid identity on the web, anonymity and pen names could not really take off and receive audience. Many individuals' first encounter with the Internet and any web communities is with Facebook, and this is because these people would not feel comfortable starting out on a place like Reddit for 4chan. For this reason, rigid identity is a necessary foundation for the usefulness of pen names and anonymity. Moot's argument that pen names are the way to go is flawed insofar as it undermines the "necessary evil" of rigid identity, which is a natural, socially evolved stepping stone for anonymity's value.

Without people going online and possessing monuments to themselves (facebook profiles) in a way they feel comfortable and secure in, anything posted online (including content under pen names) is in aggregate less valuable. Rigid identity is a necessary characteristic of social media content which can result in inexperienced web users taking the plunge to explore the rest of the less-rigid web.

Anonymous communities existed before rigid identity on the web. Those anonymous communities clearly provided some kind of value to their members and, thusly, must be considered useful.

How, then, can you argue that rigid identity is a necessary foundation for the usefulness of pen names and anonymity?

Further, I find your claim that men didn't have an identity prior to the advent of leisure time, frankly, extraordinary and, as such, the claim requires extraordinary evidence. Can you provide such evidence? Hell, even the argument that nomads don't engage in leisure time seems dubious. Wild animals have leisure time.

Something on the web has more value when it is viewed by more individuals than otherwise, correct? Early anonymous communities did provide some kind of value to their members, but they comparatively provide more value today when more individuals are present.

The problem when talking about social science is that everything is relational/relative. Rigid identity is necessary as a foundation for the MASSIVE (modern-day scale) usefulness of pen names and anonymity. It is not necessary for the smaller audience, but for the larger one which is online and present which we take for granted, it is necessary. Wild animals are often always looking for food. The claim of no-identity-before-statehood is, as stated, very, very relative, and I even wrote that this contrasts with identity as we know it today. The point is that identity did not matter when nobody had anything to do with themselves through it. Aristocrats, as written, are the exception due to their privilege of free time and surplus. The identity of a man who does one thing out of survival necessity is orders of magnitude less complex than the identity of a man who does several things and prides himself on all of them, and continuously has the option of re-defining himself.

Moreover, I have to admit that the assumption of no identity before the Industrial Revolution is something I studied in the entirety of two social geography courses dealing with how context defines the modern imaginary (as everything is only imagined with us).

I think you need to be much clearer about the exceptions to your theory, otherwise it's far too easy to refute by example.

I'd guess that most people on HN have been online since before Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye, and long since before it became popular. They created massive amounts of content, both long-lasting and ephemeral, and did so without the benefit of a Facebook profile. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that they had proto-Facebook profiles, or 'home pages' as they were known, and these served the same basic purpose. I don't think that a home page is a proto-Facebook profile, and I think that this refutes your argument that a profile or substitute profile is a necessary precondition for taking part in online discussion.

Almost every online interaction requires some kind of identity. IRC nicknames, handles or usernames on most websites, the contents of your sig on Usenet or mailing lists; these are all used to identify individuals. But there's no sense in which these need to be 'real' names, or that these different identities need to be correlated across different online social spaces. Plenty of ordinary people used AOL chat years ago without needing a rigid identity as a stepping stone. There might be a case that extremely socially conservative people ('settlers' in 'values modes' theory [1]) might need to feel that they're part of a community of 'real' people in order to interact online, and it's notable that the groups most upset at G+'s 'real names' policy were those least socially conservative, but the causality is tricky here. Either way, I don't think your argument holds up as anything close to a universal argument.

[1] http://www.cultdyn.co.uk/valuesmodes.html - I don't claim this is at all factual, but it's useful in the context of analysing how groups adopt technology differently

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