The Wardman Wire

An eminently sensible post from Dizzy about Online Identity.

Dizzy asks whether it actually matters that you know who someone is online, as long as their identity and character are consistent. And a history lesson going back - I think - before I went onto the Net (which was in the spring of 1994):

I’ve been online now for a very very long time. I can remember when using the Net was a purely console text-base experience and can remember when the Mosaic browser appeared and I suddenly had access to pictures of Erika Eleniak in her Baywatch swim suit that I could see instantly rather than relying on a description before download. There was as well something else that was true. No matter where you went, you could never really be sure that people were who they said they were. Identity belonged to the character and not necessarily to the person behind the words.

This was the rule of the game that we nerds and geeks played in our little space away from reality. It was our new frontier, our Wild West, our social rules were simple, there were to be no rules unless otherwise stated, and even then all were based on trust. If you went into a chatroom called #hot_lesbian_chat then you knew you’d be kicked out if you told them about the enormity of your manhood and your ability to ‘cure’ them. Reality morphed itself into role-playing in this world, just as Second Life does today in graphics.

Recommended.

Of course, the Wardman Wire could be a case study in this area.

Does anyone feel threatened?

[tags]online identity, dizzy, censorship, feed the troll[/tags]