The Social Dynamics of Anonymity

"One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics."

Undeniably true, and, ultimately, not startling. When it comes to Facebook – as evidenced by the discussion we had in class this past Thursday – we rarely engage meaningfully with others outside of the group of people we interact with regularly. I also caught a glimpse of what Danah Boyd describes in the stratification that is reflected online by the Facebook and MySpace divide; I switched from a public middle school to a fairly wealthy private high school thanks to a scholarship, and it was only then that I became familiar with Facebook to begin with. This was thanks in part to Facebook's infancy, but even over the years, a far larger percentage of my schoolmates at my private school had Facebook accounts in place of MySpace accounts, whereas, while there were plenty of people popping up on Facebook, the amount of MySpace users remained substantial.

So what happens when we bring ourselves into anonymous spaces? Can our offline identities create stratification when they are simply not present? To answer this, I can only reflect on the limited experience that I have had with the site that has become the object of my cultural comparison report. The medium of the messageboard essentially presents transparency or anonymity to the degree you choose. There are members of the online community that are extremely open about their personal life and try to reflect themselves in as true a fashion online as they do offline; at the same time, there are members who put little effort into representing their offline identity. The community I'm examining is one that meets on the premise of discussing hip-hop music; as such, it's a predominantly black community and it's aware of this. This has created a cliché in the community – sometimes used in jest and sometimes used with sincerity – that excuses misinformed opinions as a byproduct of "being white." In this way, Boyd's acknowledgement of pre-existing dynamics is accurate. However, there are plenty of occasions where these dynamics are thrown out the window, simply because it's impossible to uncover the identity of the person you are engaging. There are situations where favor is given to the more knowledgeable person on a particular topic, with race or class or gender becoming irrelevant. I have even gotten into discussions with others on topics that are generally outside of the realm of things I often talk about offline simply because of the anonymity granted by the site. This freedom only occurs because I am truly outside of my socially constructed boundaries.

But how did I get outside of them? Well, I'm outside these boundaries only because the boundaries are dropped. In an environment that is at first anonymous and only reflects a true offline identity when the user populates the space with its own story, social stratification cannot occur without the subject creating their strata. When it comes to discussing music, this can be done without bringing much of a deeply personal perspective to the table, and an anonymous user can remain more or less anonymous. However, when the discussion starts to branch out into topics that require a perspective that can only result from a socially constructed experience, even without deliberately describing one's own identity, the reality of who we are can become apparent, and social stratification can occur. This was especially apparent when I began to venture outside of music or sport discussion and began engaging political or current event discussions; event the most anonymous members began to reveal their identities without deliberately attempting to do so.

This is definitely an idea that requires far more attention than I've given it. I assume that further examination of the messageboard dynamic would confirm my suspicions: it seems that in trivial or impersonal situations we can escape our pre-existing identities, but otherwise, we will always fall victim to the reality of existing social dynamics.

Inverting Augmented Reality

Benkoil's piece on Augmented Reality lifts NYT writer Michael Young's definition of AR: "layering digital information onto the physical world." The article goes on to touch on interesting, entertaining, helpful, frightening examples of AR at its best and worst. But what has had me thinking since reading the piece is what happens when we do the opposite: layering physical information onto the digital world?

It's not Augmented Reality, but an inversion of it – coming up with a specific word for this touches on the impossible task of determining what is reality and where the line ends, especially with regards to cyberspace. And with digital and physical now repersenting opposites to a dichotomy we have come to accept in our society, it's not far-fetched to think of "physical" and "digital" representing two fully-fleshed out conventions of experience. With all of this in mind, head over to Google Maps, and play around in street view. Everything about the experience of Google Maps is digital, but it simply could not exist without the overlay of true, physical information. With the increasing ubiquity of GPS-enabled smartphones, this inverted AR scenario borrows even more from the physical in order to feed the digital, as Google Maps can offer you directions or satellite photography with regards to your exact location.

What else in the digital world couldn't exist without physical information? User generated content on the Internet fits this inverted AR definition just as well: Facebook wouldn't work as a purely digital space without the insertion of physical information – our lives. Any productivity software, from financial tracking, to dayplanning, to presentation making, requires the inclusion of physical information to exist. Even online shopping couldn't exist without the layering of physical information, or else we wouldn't have products to sell and prices to compare.

In the end, it seems as though most of the stuff we interact with online has a physical overlay to it, and without this physical layer of information, the Internet would be empty. Everything we do online, with very rare, nonessential exceptions, is based on some sort of human or physical data shared online. It is interesting, then, to flip back to the original topic at hand, AR. The reality we experience everyday, separate from our computers or iPhones or the Internet in general can only be enhanced by digital information; the digital world we engage in on almost-equally frequent basis simply could not exist without this physical information. Benkoil tells about USPS, and the idea of being able to hold up an item to a camera, then being told what shipping container to use, which is an awesome simplification of tasks we deal with, but not something that creates a possibility that wasn't already available. In our inversion, removing the physical information breaks the model, rendering it useless. The building blocks of the digital world are fragments of our human experience.

So, luckily, reality hasn't lost to cybereality.

Yet.

S/R 2

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is as much a philosophical trip through the implications of technology merging with the human experience as it is a riveting tale of crime and cyberspace. Broken into 5 distinct acts, the novel opens with extensive groundwork being laid for character construction. Case, our protagonist, is described as an exceptionally talented cyberthief who attempted to steal from his employer and got caught, driving his employer to poison Case with a toxin that wipes out his ability to jack in to cyberspace. The second and third of the five sections proceeds to detail the assembly of the team involved in the coming mission. This team includes Molly, Case's extensively modified partner in crime, Armitage, Case's unstable new boss and beneficiary, Peter Riviera, the psychopathic hologram-projector, and McCoy Pauley, a now-deceased cyberspace operator who was transferred into a ROM. The fourth and largest section is a series of shorter chapters detailing the actual mission embarked upon by the team. All of the action in this mission takes place on Freeside, a world unto itself, manufactured by the Tessier-Ashpool family, separate from planet Earth. On the mission, we are introduced to this corporate-structured family, and it is revealed that they are behind not only one but two different artificial intelligence entities in the novel, Wintermute and Neuromancer, both of whom are striving to combine, which turns out to be the reason for the team's mission – retrieve a password and allow the AIs to merge. Climactic scenes, involving battles, deaths, misunderstandings, and revelations abound in these short chapters, which end with Wintermute and Neuromancer taking the steps necessary to combine, but not before Armitage’s psychotic break and death, the erasing of the McCoy Pauley construct, a broken leg for Molly, and Riviera's death. The final of the five sections simply details the mission’s aftermath – within it, Molly leaves Case, Case speaks with the new combined AI, and it is revealed that Case has returned back to work he was doing before the mission, bringing the story full circle, as if the mission never happened.

Amidst the twists and turns of the plot, Gibson frequently returns to several themes he presents throughout the book, the most important of which is identity, especially when represented by two parts, ideas, entities, or concepts. Gibson poses the question of whether or not we can successfully merge two parts in order to create a greater whole – and he works to answer this question with countless examples, ranging from technology and humanity, to cyberspace and reality, to family and corporation, to Wintermute and Neuromancer, to Tessier and Ashpool, to power and emotion. In every single case that Gibson presents, the merge cannot happen without one of these original entities being destroyed upon combination – a universality that Gibson works skillfully to manufacture, but fails to, simply because reality disagrees with Gibson’s presentation of these mergers. We live in a world of augmentation, and our cultural identities are often not only informed by a duality of influences, but by a large multiplicity of influences, the number growing every day. This augmentation reaches beyond our identities as well, manifesting itself in countless ways throughout our lives, in technological streamlining, media convergence, and throughout history. People and ideas evolve but it rarely takes the destruction of who they were or what the idea began as in order to put that change into effect. The reality we live in is saturated with successful partnerships, innovative marriages of technology and theory, and other dualities at every turn. Gibson is fascinated with human nature and its destructive tendencies, especially when presented with opposition or change, but he ignores our absolutely magnificent ability to adapt, incorporate and progress. In a world where marriage exists, corporations merge, multiracial people connect equally with their multiple backgrounds, and segregation is slowly becoming a convention of the past, one thing is clear: change can occur without destruction.

Neuromancer + Wintermute = :)

Duality consumes every bit of Neuromancer. But the duality we see in Neuromancer is not two simply coexisting facets of a given entity or situation – duality is presented as a competition. Destruction of one identity is what breeds combination, and this theme is present throughout the novel.

While this theme is present throughout the novel, from The Dixie Flatline's existence in cyberspace as a result of his real-life death, to Case's inability to experience reality or cyberspace without significant sacrifice, to the simple fact that physical modification in Neuromancer as a result of technology results in the destruction of the human element, it is no better exemplified by the products and existence of the Tessier-Ashpool corporation. Most obviously, the longing Wintermute has to combine with Neuromancer represents the primary act of combination and duality in the novel. Combination cannot occur without Wintermute's self-destruction, but the urge to combine and grow into something greater — in this case, a god-like entity — overpowers Wintermute's yearning for self-preservation. The combination of Neuromancer and Wintermute, two machine identities, represents the idea of duality as a destruction of at least one part of the combination in the least damaging light, an intriguing development on its own. But perhaps more fascinating in Neuromancer is the "meat" side of the Tessier-Ashpool relationship with duality and destruction.

On its surface, Tessier-Ashpool seems innocent enough: just the combination of two names and families that came together. However, an examination of the familial history of the Tessier-Ashpool group reveals the consequences of duality in its darkest representation. First, the literal — Ashpool strangled Tessier before Tessier's grand vision was given the opportunity to come to fruition. The joining of two families, Tessiers and Ashpools, resulted in the literal destruction of one of these partners at the hands of the other. This immediacy in destruction, with one entity being responsible for the destruction of the other, is a powerful fact that cannot be understated. Throughout the novel, in order to build, one must destroy; the Tessier-Ashpool family enjoyed great wealth and fortune through establishing a large software development company, but not without a grave cost.

More abstract — but far more powerful — is the notion of the Tessier-Ashpool collective as a family and as a corporation. At the stage in which Case encounters the Tessier-Ashpool group, they are primarily a corporation with familial remnants discernible only in the grudges that remained between living and dead members of the family. In their tireless pursuit for success, the notion that the Tessier-Ashpools are a family dissolved. The Tessier-Ashpools represent a dual identity — part family, part corporation — but these two parts could not effectively coexist. As with all other examples of duality in Neuromancer, from the AIs, to the marriage of Tessier and Ashpool, to the bodily modifications in the book, to Dixie Flatline, one part was destroyed in order for the existence to continue. In typical Tessier-Ashpool fashion, the part destroyed was destroyed at the hands of the opposing part: the family was destroyed by the corporate ambitions of the group.

Dichotomies play an extremely important role in Neuromancer, but the nature of their creation holds an even greater value. Headlined by the Tessier-Ashpool corporation and its creations, this theme has a stake in every piece of action in Neuromancer. One of the biggest questions posed by Neuromancer is that of the intrusion of technology on the human experience, and vice versa — but more important is the question of whether we can combine these two aspects of reality into one without completely destroying the other.

Neuromancer 1-5

Amidst the tight twists and turns of the plot and the striking array of technological vocabulary, Neuromancer taken a very curious stance on gender roles and the distortion of the female – and sometimes human – identity. Molly, Case's de facto partner throughout the beginning of the book, represents this identity distortion most effectively and drastically, delivering proof of technology's stranglehold on the human and female experience in Neuromancer.

The author himself plays a broad role in the differentiation of females from society's accepted norm. Molly is decidedly dominant – a simple but powerful character trait that responds to and contradicts the traditional gender roles, especially at the time of the writing of this novel. She drives much of the action, and is far more informed than Case is about anything that is happening in the novel after their initial acquaintance. Her informed demeanor and dominant personality contrast with Case's forced participation and often detached action; Case seems to be numbly drifting through the novel so far. Reflecting this inverted power structure extremely well is the scene in which Case is fitted for and subsequently linked into Molly's senses works. The details Gibson delivers in this scene position Molly as once again the dominant character, as Case is literally forced into passivity while Molly leads the way. He is forced to see through her eyes and feel what she feels; upon command, Case retreats from Molly's senses.

Molly's role in Neuromancer is importantly influenced by the digital fingerprints technology has left on her existence; she is defined and recognized by little more than the changes that have taken place in her life. Most of her senses are explicitly modified – her fingers sport razor blades and her eyes sport an active monitoring display. The eye modification is especially interesting; the mirrors largely obstruct the view of her real eyes, so eye contact can never be made with Molly. Extensive modification has also seemingly created a largely emotionless personality within Molly, which also digresses from conventional gender identities. Technology's role in Molly's involvement in prostitution also serves as an identity deconstruction, as both people involved in a transaction are experiencing something completely removed from a real interaction. Throughout the book, she is characterized by her upgrades and surgeries – this is even true for our protagonist Case. He has had nearly no work done on his body, except for the toxin sacs that Armitage surgically inserted into his bloodstream, and even then, this surgery essentially defines and drives Case as he progresses through the novel. We are explicitly told about the modifications received by nearly every single character introduced in Neuromancer – Gibson wants us to see people as not the summation of their life experiences, but as the summation of technological experiences, as these technological experiences literally shape who they are at a given moment, and often why they are doing what they are doing.