This link has been bookmarked by 7 people . It was first bookmarked on 06 Aug 2011, by Todd Suomela.
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10 May 12
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The person is alternately posting on a message board and trolling a chat room under an assumed name, and probably an assumed age, sex, and/or location.
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That’s probably why being who you say you are is a cornerstone of what many people consider responsible World Wide Web usage, though it carries with it its own set of problems and worries, tricking us into believing that we’re as safe as the dog sleeping under the desk.
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And you know what? He wasn’t. Well, he was real, but he wasn’t who he said he was, and in life (and particularly on dates) this is generally looked down upon.
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19 Mar 12
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The two people you meet online—the anonymous and the oversh
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, the tapping of fingers on keys, the fantasy of being Petunia, 18 years old, from Princeton, N.J., when in fact the person at the desk is really Robert, 49, from North Hollywo
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the internet mall.
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4chan challenges the benefits of creating an online persona or brand, and they’re right to; the internet was built from cinderblocks of porn and piracy—basic human fun, not the pages of Emily Post.
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Increasingly, we edit ourselves
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They would like to be nasty to you, or politically incorrect to the point of alienating absolutely everyone, or otherwise say something that would tarnish their own online brand.
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e.g., fun, entertainment, and a pop-art consume-and-destroy sensibility) doesn’t align with mainstream beliefs (e.g., your photos, your Foursquare check-ins, constant affirmations that you are who you say you are)
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Petunia lived out Robert’s fantasy of being a derelict Parisian prostitute,
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Conversations about the internet in this age were marked by distrust, not of the internet itself, but of the shady portion of its population and the possibility of multiple identities used nefariously:
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our physical selves are validated by their online reflections
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The alternative will appear when those of us who create content stop life-casting as singular, identifiable identities, and start dividing like an embryo into plural selves, taking turns with our check-ins, disagreeing with each other politically, creating a virtual privacy sign to place on the doorknobs of our lives.
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but to devise a much more creative and fractured experience for yourself online.
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but the worst part is that we have to live with them forever, tacked onto our “brand” even when we’ve evolved past that dark moment
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18 Mar 12
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though surely it’s possible to exist actually without existing virtually, my first thought was, Hey, that guy’s not real.
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But starting over can feel so good. It’s like exfoliating.
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There is a time and place to be yourself, a well-edited human who sometimes types his or her mind’s contents into the abyss; there’s also room for what you almost said, for what you almost let yourself think, for what you imagine for yourself and the experiences that pulverize you so that your bones turn to jelly and you slide down the drain.
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06 Aug 11
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4chan challenges the benefits of creating an online persona or brand, and they’re right to; the internet was built from cinderblocks of porn and piracy—basic human fun, not the pages of Emily Post. A useful tool that handles your bills and tracks your Domino’s pizza order still bombards you with talking pop-up ads, trolls appearing to be casually racist or aggressively hateful, even during a bleak and business-like discussion of where to find a good mechanic.
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There’s a thrill to it, taking the opportunity to go undercover when it feels as though you’re breaking the unwritten code of web transparency, but there could be a bigger thrill: creating a cadre of anonymous personas, not with the intent of using them as heckle-puppets or comment trolls, definitely not using them to seduce strangers into dark sedans or wreak general havoc, but to devise a much more creative and fractured experience for yourself online. It is strange that the web, which in every way attempts to cater to the fantasies of its audience (we’re drooling at your photos of dinner at Momofuku, watching six-hour marathons of television shows that we would never admit to our TiVos that we enjoy, airbrushing our profile pictures), would ask us to be so honest about which coffee shops we frequent enough to earn a mayor badge or how we look on any given Wednesday. It’s nice because it fosters trust, but it’s a shame because there are so many other options that we’re being steered away from, partially because we like to guide our networks (people who actually know us, people who feel like they know us because we’ve shared so much of ourselves with them) towards things like our band’s concerts, our essays, our books, our plays and our birthday parties (and additionally because not everyone’s playing by the open-book, be-yourself rules). This is an obvious negative of a false persona: It arrives friendless and nascent, it doesn’t want a Facebook, and it is unrecognizable at the grocery store or at parties. It’s unable to promote itself. Starting over can be daunting, when your rebirth is as a fake adult who doesn’t know anybody. But starting over can feel so good. It’s like exfoliating.
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There are no actual rules, but suggestions of decorum so as to make the algorithm most efficient, the picture it produces of you the clearest. 4chan doesn’t respect the algorithm, and, sometimes, neither should we. There is a time and place to be yourself, a well-edited human who sometimes types his or her mind’s contents into the abyss; there’s also room for what you almost said, for what you almost let yourself think, for what you imagine for yourself and the experiences that pulverize you so that your bones turn to jelly and you slide down the drain. A little mystery can change the flavor of the whole casserole, and you won’t see it reflected in your Facebook ads; I want to know what happened when you paced on the Brooklyn Bridge one dark winter evening. I don’t have to look you in the eye afterwards; maybe it’s better if it was both you, and not you.
I’ll see you in another internet, when we are both cats.
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