22 June 2011
NEW YORK - Not too long ago, theorists fretted that the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived. Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies.
Women who were online pen pals of former United States Congressman Anthony Weiner (picture) learned how quickly Internet users can sniff out all the details of a person's online life. So did the men who set fire to cars and looted stores in the wake of Vancouver's Stanley Cup ice hockey defeat last week when they were identified and tagged by acquaintances online.
The collective intelligence of the Internet's 2 billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on websites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view.
To some, this could conjure up comparisons to the agents of repressive governments in the Middle East who monitor online protests and exact retribution offline. But the positives can be numerous: Criminals can be ferreted out, falsehoods can be disproved and individuals can become Internet icons.
When a freelance photographer, Mr Rich Lam, checked his pictures of the riots in Vancouver, he spotted several shots of a man and a woman, surrounded by police officers in riot gear, in the middle of a like-nobody's-watching kiss. When the photos were published, a worldwide dragnet of sorts ensued to identify the "kissing couple." Within a day, the couple's relatives had tipped off news websites to their identities, and they appeared on the Today show. Scott Jones and Alex Thomas were the latest proof that, thanks to the Internet, every day could be a day that will be remembered around the world.
"It's kind of amazing that there was someone there to take a photo," Ms Thomas said on Today. The "kissing couple" will most likely enjoy just a tweet's worth of fame, but it is noteworthy that they were tracked down at all.
This growing "publicness", as it is sometimes called, comes with significant consequences for commerce, for political speech and ordinary people's right to privacy. There are efforts by governments and corporations to set up online identity systems. Technology will play an even greater role in the identification of once-anonymous individuals: Facebook, for instance, is already using facial recognition technology in ways that are alarming to European regulators.
"Publicity" - something normally associated with celebrities - "is no longer scarce," Mr Dave Morgan, the chief executive of Simulmedia,wrote in an essay this month.
He posited that because the Internet "can't be made to forget" images and moments from the past, like an outburst on a train or a kiss during a riot, "the reality of an inescapable public world is an issue we are all going to hear a lot more about". THE NEW YORK TIMES
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