Some thoughts on Internet identity and Authenticity
Sunday, September 6, 2009 by Grace Liu
According to Kennedy’s article “Beyond Anonymity”, the arrival of Internet provides an ideal space for its users freely exhibits their selection of identity. It suggests that in such anonymous environments, identity can be broken into fragments, deconstructed and reconstructed. Cyberspace like Facebook usually has several general questions about user details you need to fill in when the first time their users sign up, it provides a possibility of anonymous but simultaneously it encourages to fill in those question with real information, therefore, users are experiencing a certain process to pick up their identities through photos, status, and links which they wanted to be shown. It proves that fluidity and fragmentation are essences of Internet identities, it also shows that the capability of reconstruction of identity and anonymous could be problematic.
Websites like Wikipedia generates a large group of citizen journalists could be used as one example to contradict the first filter of Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model. It could be argued that with the easy access to Internet, it allows more and more people freely sharing information and opinions globally. So that the claim of media monopoly dominates the source of information may no longer be so considerable than past. However, anonymous may benefit those citizen journalists from not taking serious responsibility, it also causes the reliance of the content on those websites going decrease. The quality of those writings is doubted since everyone gets an equal chance to access the Internet, the result of what a viewer is searching on wiki could be written by your neighbor or an uneducated people. This is probably why wikipedia is strongly forbidden by most lecturers as a reference resource. The authenticity of those web content seems to be low, if a viewer is searching for some news on the Internet, how many of them would use wikinews instead of professional news sites?
Therefore, the relation between technology, society and culture is a complicated, to judge whether the Internet is either bad or good for society and its culture in general is like flipping a coin, could be two opposite sides.