10 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2022
    1. I am not afraid of Charlie because he writes extreme, offensive things online. I am afraid of him because I recognize so many of his proclivities in regular people—the shifting eyes, the formless references and mental absence. If you spend all of your time consuming internet culture, you are consuming stories and myths and personalities that only exist online. To curate your online presence is to give up a piece of your physical self, to live in a simulated universe of your own creation. 
    2. When you meet extremely online people, you would expect them to at least talk. The best internet personalities come off as sharp and funny online and possess a natural digital fluency that conveys a degree of social skill. Even if they are not necessarily normal, you might expect that the strongest posters would be anti-social geniuses—brilliant minds trapped in tortured bodies, released onto the timeline. But in person, they stare straight ahead, pull out their phones, and show you their sharp, funny comments from the internet, then find a way to end the conversation quickly if you don’t have enough mutual followers.
    3. Internet people, or people whose entire identities are wrapped up in their online presence, represent a new direction of culture. You don’t have to live in or know about the real world to be important. You can loop around and around in a tiny online world with its own values and characters, and that is enough.
    4. Everyone knows someone who has lost a piece of themselves to the internet. They latch onto a digital community and start to think it’s the whole world. 
  2. Dec 2020
    1. And then there was what Lanier calls “data dignity”; he once wrote a book about it, called Who Owns the Future? The idea is simple: What you create, or what you contribute to the digital ether, you own.

      See Tim Berners-Lee's SOLID project.

  3. Nov 2020
    1. Nothing represents you like your name. It’s been your brand since you were born. So when you’re online, you want your identity to match who you are in the real world.
    1. anonymous imageboard

      4chan is reasonably unique in the current online landscape, in that it permits conversation by totally anonymous users. This allows its users to post without much thought about their privacy status, which they often take for granted. This unique level of privacy fostered by anonymity, in a way, partially delivers on the Cyberspace rhetoric of the 1990s in that people can't be judged by their physical identities unless they offer identifying information up themselves. That's not to say that 4chan is a welcoming space for all (or even most) users, though, as it has been acknowledged, even later here in Ellis' article, that 4chan houses plenty of white supremacist tendencies, but, strictly speaking, as far as one's ideas go, they are judged purely based on their merit so long as no additional personal identifiers are offered. As Dillon Ludemann notes in his paper, /pol/emics: Ambiguity, scales, and digital discourse on 4chan, white supremacy, as well as other, "practiced and perceived deviancy is due to the default blanket of anonymity, and the general discourse of the website encourages users to remain unnamed. This is further enforced and embodied as named users, colloquially known as 'namefags,' are often vilified for their separation from the anonymous collective community" (Ludemann, 2018).

      Hypothetically, since all users start out as anonymous, one could also present their identity however they so please on the platform, and in theory what this means is that the technology behind the site promotes identity exploration (and thus cyberspace rhetoric), even though in practice, what most users experience is latent racism that depends on users' purposefully offered identifying information or generalized white supremacist posts that are broadcasted for all on the site to see.

      Work Cited:

      Ludemann, D. (2018). /pol/emics: Ambiguity, scales, and digital discourse on 4chan. Discourse, Context & Media, 24, 92-98. doi: 10.1016/j.dcm.2018.01.010

  4. Oct 2020
  5. Jul 2020
  6. Jun 2020