The Problem with Anonymity [Guest Post]

Guest post by Daniel H.

Recently The New Yorker magazine published an article called “Friend Game,” in which it described a strange case of teenage suicide. In the article, the author tells the tragic story of Megan, a girl who created a MySpace account as a sort of social adventure in her small suburban town and eventually allowed herself to be so deeply affected by the actions of her online friends that she ended her life because she felt rejected by them, people she had never even met.

It turns out her online crush, a boy named Josh, was actually the creation of her neighbor, a girl she had known all her life. The girl’s parents had encouraged her to create a MySpace identity in order to test Megan’s true feelings toward their daughter, and watched approvingly as she lured Megan into a “friendship” by using a picture of a handsome boy who liked similar kinds of music and who came across as bashful yet charming. You can go on to read the rest. It’s devastating. Josh, who is actually the neighbor girl and her parents, rejects Megan’s friendship and calls her names. Megan, unable to cope, takes her own life. Like I said, devastating. And here, I also must lament the anonymity which allowed neighbors to be strangers to one another, to allow their deepest selfishnesses to play out at the expense of another.

And is it strange that all of this is happening at the same time when we use the word “community” to describe relationships which occur in cyberspace? MySpace calls itself “a place for friends,” craigslist promotes a community of exhange and indeed, you can have “friends” on a number of social networking sites, but shouldn’t we be cautious of any friendship community which doesn’t decry one’s anonymity? It seems to me that you can never have true community without being known by others, and it seems an insult to the word “friendship” to have friends who neither know or are known by you. There’s something valuable about a community which acknowledges both our triumphs and sins, our strengths and weaknesses as part of being human. If we believe in being more human, we should fight our own attempts to be anonymous.

This being said, I also believe that we must differentiate between privacy and anonymity. While we should oppose anonymity in our relationships, it should not come at the cost of privacy to total transparency. The best way to fight our own tendencies to be anonymous is not through total transparency, and we, as dwellers in the age of the internet must also be cautious of this fact An opposite tendency exists, especially for any of us who blog or participate in online social networking, to put all of ourselves out for critique and/or praise. This costs us little physically and emotionally and therefore gains us little in return. The best way to avoid anonymity is to develop communities, real, live, face-to-face communities where we understand the justice, humility, and humanity in knowing and being known by each other.

This week’s required reading: