Post-digital Bodies – Blog Post
Are we ever who we say we are online? From a young age, we are told that we should be protecting our identities from strangers on the internet. Our parents and teachers would constantly drill into us the dangers of the online world and to never share our full names, addresses or school names online. But as we’ve grown up and the online world has expanded, it feels like we’ve forgotten about these dangers. With apps like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook we are encouraged to share more of our lives online with our friends. But do we really know who we are sharing our content with?
For many children growing up in the United Kingdom during the 2000s, like myself, the first experience of interacting with other people online was through the online game Club Penguin. Club Penguin was a game set in a ‘virtual world, where the players were penguins, and was featuring a large range of minigames and other online activities, and was based on a snowy island’ (Club Penguin Fandom, 2020). Club Penguin allows people to become friends with other people and talk with them through the game. Digital platforms like Club Penguin are designed to ‘network people’ and as a result, creates mediated intimacies between users through ‘personal connections’ made (Attwood et al., 2017,p.250). However, how sure can we be that the people we form friendships with on Club Penguin are who they describe themselves to be as due to Club Penguin’s rules, people are not allowed to use their real names when creating an account. In a survey conducted by Brenda Danet, ‘close to 80 percent of Web users […] admitted to pretending to be a different gender, race or sexual orientation than they were in “real life”’ (1998, 129-158). This aspect of anonymity online can lead to negative effects such as ‘cyberbullying and defamatory gossip’ (Moore, 2020).
So this leads to a question to think about; what is more dangerous – sharing who we are online or the ability to have anonymity online?
For another example of anonymity online, check out the effects of catfishing through Glee here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMzq-zf_MWs
References –
Attwood, F., Hakim, J., & Winch, A. (2017). Mediated intimacies: bodies, technologies and relationships. Journal of Gender Studies, 26 (3), 249-253. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1297888
Club Penguin Wiki. (2020). Club Penguin. https://clubpenguin.fandom.com/wiki/Club_Penguin
Danet, B. (1998). Text as mask: Gender, play, and performance on the internet. New media cultures, 2, 129-158. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452243689.n5
Moore, C. (2020). Moore: The Dangers of Online Anonymity. The Dartmouth. https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2020/05/moore-dangers-of-anonymity
Pixabay. (2021). Penguin.
Youtube. (2017). Glee – Ryder Finds Out Unique Was The Catfish 4×22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMzq-zf_MWs
