Remember that old New Yorker cartoon about anonymity on the web? “On the web, nobody knows you’re a dog”.
On the Internet, everybody knows you’re a dog
Anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web’s most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites, or sign up for MySpace, or submit videos to YouTube. Quite the opposite: The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you’re a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.
[...] so much deception? Because On the Internet, Nobody Knows you’re a Dog. Because people typically use screen names rather than real ones, their ramblings are anonymous and [...]