Since the invention of the Internet and cyberspace, people have been able to interact online. Are we different people online from the people we are offline? Does the Internet provide us with more significant insights about ourselves? How does its anonymity affect us?
The concept of the "self"
The concept of identity tries to answer a simple question: “Who am I?”
Ancient philosophers and theorists were the first to try to understand who we are. In the 1800s, the fathers of psychology attempted to describe the “self.” They did that by considering the self as a subject, an object, and compared to others in society.
One shared concept among these theories is that a person cannot define themselves without considering their social environment. In this light, the idea of self becomes fluid and less identifiable.
The SIDE theory
The Social Identity model of De-individualization Effects (SIDE) describes identity development as a flexible and situation-specific process.
- According to the SIDE theory, when people are visually anonymous, their personal identities become less important, and their social identities become more important. There is a shift from individual to group identity, promoting behaviour that conforms to the group.
The assumption is that visual anonymity encourages depersonalization because it reduces the interpersonal basis for social comparison, self-awareness, and self-presentation.
The theory of possible selves
The theory of possible selves sustains that people don’t understand themselves as people in the present moment. Instead, they see themselves as representations of their future selves. This could be the expected self (the person you believe you can realistically become), the person you hope to become, or the person you hope you won’t become. There are also further distinctions between the actual self, the ideal self, and the ought-to self.
All these possible selves and their discrepancies determine how psychologically healthy a person is.
Is our identity different online?
In 1993, Peter Steiner illustrated a cartoon for The New Yorker, with the following caption: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.“
In other words, the anonymous nature of the Internet provides opportunities for people to be disembodied, that is, to create and experience an identity that is no longer constrained to a physical appearance.
So much so that, in 1995, theorist Sherry Turkle named a computer ‘a second self’ and argued that the Internet allowed people to reinvent themselves.
Turkle studied people’s interactions in virtual environments, including gaming and virtual worlds. She observed that cyberspace allows individuals to play with their identities, adopting multiple online personas. The Internet thus becomes a liberating space, free from gender and form, that allows individuals to become who or what they want.
From liberation to fragmentation
However, cyberspace has changed and evolved since the Nineties. As the Internet has become increasingly accessible and part of people’s daily lives, individuals tend to feel overwhelmed and depleted. Virtual worlds offer better lives than reality, and technology is seductive to people with vulnerabilities.
While relationships are more accessible than ever, technology has brought us to social saturation, and relationships start and end much faster in the digital world. This makes people isolate themselves more despite having more social interactions.
With the rise of social media, our identity is fragmented into different profiles with a specific purpose. You can think of how you present yourself on Facebook and LinkedIn. Each platform has an expected behaviour, where we show only parts of our identity. What we show online may or may not reflect our true identity, and is often our idealized self or experimentations of our possible selves.
Is the Internet really anonymous?
As the Internet and its spaces evolve, there are fewer spaces where people can genuinely be visually anonymous. People like to show pictures and videos of themselves online, but in a selective and curated fashion. At the same time, more aspects of our physical lives are present in cyberspace: bills, accounts, subscriptions, applications… Today, people have fewer opportunities to express themselves online without being traced or recognized.
While new, less globalized social online spaces are emerging, our offline life increasingly merges with technology and online life. So a new, more fitting question might be: do we behave differently online, after all?