One of my favorite websites as of late has been
Yelp and I've been busy yelpifying Tacoma, adding reviews for places I go, particularly places that haven't been reviewed yet -- it seems to help get the ball rolling and others often seem to add reviews when there's at least one but not a huge number.
In any case, Yelp's trade-marked tag-line is "Real People. Real Reviews" and I think it goes a long way towards making the site as successful as it seems to be -- that is, they put value on attaching persona and identity to reviews and it builds a bit of credibility for frequent reviewers. In turn, their reviews are taken as more genuine expressions rather than suspected bits of astroturfing or
sockpupetting. Indeed, it's not an
infrequent topic on the yelp community discussion boards and people do notice. In the end, any such "fraudulent" reviews will likely be filtered out as statistical noise if there are enough contradictory reviews posted.
Another, related, phenomenon is that of business owners
contacting reviewers directly. In many cases, this is just via Yelp's messaging system, but in others, it's been outside of yelpish channels, via email or even phone and (I believe) text messages. In the good cases, business owners want to work to resolve something or thank a reviewer for a good review. In the worst, reviewers have had obscenities and threats thrown their way.
My knee-jerk reaction is to view this as just being a part of internet life -- and life outside of it as well. We should be accountable for what we say, right? Especially when it can have an effect on someone else's livelihood, right? What about cases where such expression may change someone's opinion of something, some group or someone? Going further still, what if it's a whistleblower or someone who does fear for their safety or reputation if they post something with which someone disagrees or that someone dislikes? Where does one's freedom of expression meet the obligation of non-anonymity? Is there a right to anonymity, in the constitution or elsewhere?
Stepping back, are there cases where anonymity mixed with public expression is a good thing?Are there use-cases where it's better that someone can be anonymous? In this case, I think my answer is an enthusiastic 'yes', though I can't quite nail down the specifics in a way that satisfies me.
Anonymous forums seem likely avenues for people to get help and ask questions when the topics would embarrass the poster if it weren't anonymous. How many people have found community support before they came out or before they sought professional help for mental illness, for example? Would they have been willing, or in some senses, able, to ask for that help if they knew that they'd not be anonymous? I think the answer is frequently 'no'.
There seems to be a growing appreciation for the need for anonymity and privacy (admittedly distinct ideas, however interrelated they may be), as evidenced in web browsers (Safari's "Private Browsing" mode, Google Chrome's "Incognito" mode and Firefox's option to clear private information at will or on application closing), as well as Slashdot's option for registered users to post anonymously (one that's been around for a long time, I might add) and in many other cases as well, but all of it still seems to be lost in the growing trend of hyper-awareness and traceability.
It'd be an easy option to just say that anonymity makes up for a lack of courage; allowing people to say and do what they don't have the backbone to say or do when they can be identified, and that the fault then lies with the person themselves...
Instead, I think we, as a society, need to take a hard look at what I feel is an innate need for privacy and anonymity.
This is especially true with the growing frequency of government and ISP monitoring of internet traffic and the ability to track and identify individuals by all sorts of relatively novel means, be it automated facial recognition, writing analysis, cellphone usage patterns, etc. If everything were 100% tracked and we were held strictly accountable for everything we did, said, asked, looked at or looked for, society wouldn't be the place it is today... and I'd wager that it wouldn't be a place that people would feel comfortable fully "being themselves", whatever that may mean.
Fundamental parts of the modern human social experience, from humor to business and romance depend on little doses of indecision, untraceability or indetermination. Would it be anywhere near as exciting for me to give my wife flowers if she knew I'd gotten them 30 seconds after I made the purchase? Could I surprise my friends with a surprise party if they could see that 20 of their closest friends were on the other side of the door, thanks to the coming wonders of GPS and smart phones? Would a blind date ever happen? Further, humor is sometimes funnier, or at least able to range further into grey areas when it's about anonymous people rather than specific individuals -- the same way violence on TV or in films is more acceptable when it's removed from real contexts. If things are sufficiently removed from real experience, we feel okay laughing or watching what would otherwise be something truly unthinkable or horrific.
The truth is that the unexpected and the disconnected is a large part of what makes the highs the human experience and not just the lows. As such, it seems that anonymity is an essential part of the human experience, just as much as strong social connections are... and I pray that we learn to honor it as we gain the power to destroy it.
