What does our face hide in our words?

Are you the same person when nobody's looking?

 

It's a well known and parodied phenomenon that people's views of their own ability to win a fight and their confidence in insulting others greatly increases as the chances of such a fight get slimmer. And now in the age of the internet it is possibly to have an aggressive confrontation with someone who isn't even in the same country as you. So is it that our need to maintain our own positive face in social situations is what's stopping us from acting this way all the time? And that if we were made anonymous in our daily lives this is how life would be. Or perhaps it's that the distance from a situation gives us a chance to act out of character purely because it doesn't matter and it might be fun, interesting or a relief to be able to be a different, more expressive person for a while, consequence free.

                Think about internet blog posts. This system of communication has the potential to be either completely anonymous or completely informed of real life identity and character. One can literally write whatever they want about themselves. And readers can comment on it however they like with no issues of consequence. This is why it's intriguing to look at how many blogs keep true to the writer's "real life self" and how many weave a new identity to write as. Herring, Wright, Bonus and Scheidt (2004) found that about a third of the blog posts they investigated gave a full name and over half of them gave explicit demographic information such as age and rough address (David A. Huffaker and Sandra L. Calvert in the journal of computer mediated communication).  It's strange that in a world where you can pretend to be anyone you want this many people would keep to being themselves. Unless the feeling of freedom in revealing personal, possibly intimate details of their lives without having to maintain face with people they will see again is what they are after. But surely a certain amount of anonymity would make them feel more comfortable in revealing private thoughts and secrets.

                Of course some people don't use the anonymity afforded by the internet for revealing private secrets or talking about their boring day. Many people use the internet specifically to annoy people, goad them into arguments and insult them. Many new words have even had to be coined specifically because of the scale and diversity of the ways the internet makes it possible to cause trouble for people: "troll", "flame war", "noob". Some of this comes from the more "internet savvy" surfers trying to diverge themselves from less computer literate internet users with jargen that only they understand. This is often covertly insulting to the subject such as "newfriend" as a form of address. Seeming quite friendly, this actually came from "newfag" and is used to say that someone is stupid and inexperienced according to Urbandictionary.com And though this does happen in real life it is much more prevalent on the internet and much more effective as literally thousands of users could bully one victim like this. Maybe people are more vicious on the internet just so they're not the one being an outcast.

 

By Greg Rushton