Project 4

For my project, my main purpose was to find examples of people acting differently than they normally might, assumingly because they can enjoy the distance afforded them by an online identity. The main settings for the project are online forums, also called message boards, where people typically post items related to a main topic. These message boards require membership, which allows the people who use them to assume online personas, which may or may not be similar to their actual, real world personas. In some cases, like MySpace or Facebook, the users’ online identities can be very intricate. Pictures, contact information, and biographical information very often give other users a more realistic idea of what somebody’s actual identity is. These types of “profiles” are usually legitimated through contact with other users through the ubiquitous “comment” or “message” sections that are typical of those particular interfaces.

In other cases, message boards are more anonymous, requiring only a valid e-mail address to confirm membership. While there is still a rudimentary template in place for users to post pictures and personal information, these users do not typically represent themselves as realistically as they would through an interface like Facebook. Real names are rarely used, and pictures are typically less personal, giving way to animations and other types of artwork to make the user’s template more distinct. These are the forums through which I assumed people would argue more aggressively. In these types of forums I included the comment sections often found at the bottom of the page in online news articles.

I only considered trolling as a method of last resort, since almost everyone who regularly uses the message boards is familiar with the practice, and in most cases either do not respond to the instigation, or report it to forum moderators. On sites where trolling was not well-moderated, the volume of posts was not substantial enough to generate the long, multi-party arguments that I had in mind. Instead of actively manifesting arguments, I first tried to locate forums where the members were likely to be aggressive and/or the subject matter was controversial. I thought this would increase the likelihood of finding some good material for the assignment.

What started as an effort to satisfy the elements of “unspeakable” and “scandalous,” however, turned out to be much more forgettable than I would have liked. Of course, the other avenue was to do the assignment on the “everyday” and “forgotten.” Particularly in the well-moderated, large-volume forums, scandalous posts are removed within minutes or seconds. Left behind, however, are literally miles of text consisting of opinions, and arguments, both logically supported and not, that are of virtually no consequence, even to the people who wrote them.

Some of them, I thought, were pretty funny:













Others were more typical of the type of dialogue I expected to find:














On the whole, I was surprised to find that my assumptions weren't clearly correct. The amount of anonymity didn't seem to matter much to the people posting, although I still think the factor of distance emboldens people to say things they wouldn't say to someone on the street.