Course:LIBR559A/Boyd, D. (2012) (2)

Citation

boyd, d. (2012). The politics of "real names": Power, context, and control in networked publics. Communications of the ACM, 55(8), 29-31. Retrieved from https://www.danah.org/papers/2012/CACM-RealNames.pdf

Annotation

In her article, Boyd explores the ideas of online anonymity and pseudonymity. She compares Facebook, the largest online community with Google, the largest search engine and states that people are expected to use their real names on both, Facebook and Google Plus. According to the author, Facebook was originally created to be an identity service, whereas Google - instead of creating a value and offering a natural way for users to use their real names, they made it a requirement. Boyd also refers to Lessing's perspective who argues there are four factors that regulate social systems. These are: the market, the law, social norms and technology or architecture (we discussed these in the very first class this semester!). Accordingly, Lessing says that social norms are what drives the real names culture of Facebook, but Google is driven by market and technology. Boyd continues to examine the idea of real names and compares their meaning in real and virtual worlds. For example, in real life, people use their real names for the purposes of introductions, politeness, openness - overall, relationship building - they do not simply share their names with every single person they encounter. Thus, some companies implement real name policies in order to promote healthy online business interactions. However, at the same time, online search to find information about a given person seems much more accessible today as it only requires a few clicks. The searcher does not have to worry about answering provoked question of Why do you need to know? Hence, Boyd argues that search engines free searchers from social consequences. Furthermore, the author believes that when people prefer not to share their names - it seems that they have something to hide. And just because a person chooses to share some information about themselves, does not mean that they give up privacy. She defines the concept of privacy - privacy in not about restricting information, instead, it is about revealing appropriate information in a given context. "People feel as though their privacy has been violated when their agency has been undermined or when information about a particular social context has been obscured in ways that subvert people's ability to make an informed decision about what to reveal. This is why people feel so disempowered by technological moves where they feel as though they cannot properly manage the social situation."

Boyd provides useful examples to explain her arguments and I agree with her that in case of identity service, a real names policy is important. However, using real names can change the intended meaning or goal of the service in a sense. What I mean is that users might be careful about what and how they post which may result in limited honesty. In addition, they will probably be less likely to share personal and intimate information which they might otherwise discuss when using a pseudonym. As for creating a new policy, we talked about it during our in-class discussions, it is really difficult to come up with a fair policy that encompasses a compromise between direct and indirect stakeholders. Also, it is easy to speak about it, it seems easy in discourse, but when we have to apply these ideas in real life - it becomes a real challenge. The author emphasized such difficulty but she does not really offer concrete solutions.

Page Author: Aleks Migorska