Having an identity online is something which is so different to having one in person. People are able to use their imaginations to guess what sort of person you are. Im not sure whether this is right.
There has been a lot in the media recently about Facebook and privacy etc. I found an interesting site online that underlined the privacy issues within Facebook and its really good, so check it out. http://www.danah.org/papers/FacebookAndPrivacy.html (hope it works)
In relation to not putting your full name on your account, not only on facebook, but other sites too. Im not too sure about it, I think there is not really any real need to put both names, because me saying ellie, rather than ellie keene, doesnt really make much difference. The only thing it would do, would be to confuse your friends online as to which ellie you were. Does anyone think there are major problems with doing this?
I think there are a few risks with not saying who you really are online. You have this instant trust with people online and without knowing it, you are actually trusting this person is who they say they are......then again, why shouldnt we trust them?
Personally nothing has ever happened to me on social networking sites such as Facebook, that puts me in any danger. The only thing i have done recentlyis taken off my birthday and mobile number because apparently people can hack into your bank accounts or something like that.
Going back to the idea of trust. It is funny that we trust people so easily online, if someone were to be lying about their age or name face to face, it would be easier to see if they were lying. Online, we just have option to believe them!
With regards to discussing online groups. I think that it is really easy to put up this barrier and pretend you are something you are not. Like in a discussion board, it is easy online to pretend you know what others are talking about and you can easily change your identity to fit into specific groups.
What does everyone else think? Are we silly to believe everything online? Or as a society, do we simply just believe it because we have no choice but to?
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I find this lying on line thing so debatable. Don't people lie directly to your face IRL? Maybe not about their name so often, but about what they have done, what they feel, who they know, etc. I don't agree that we know when people are lying. We think we do, but we don't. If we take the issue of children out of the equation (and that's not easy to do), then does it matter if you don't know these people you are communicating with? Does it matter that their name is George not Dave, or that they are 45 not 29?
Great link to some thought provoking material! The author makes some fundamental observations about human instincts which are sometimes overlooked in academic contribution to the web debates - we forget we're only human.
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