Gotcha! Why Online Anonymity May Be Fading
Author Andrew Keen, who wrote a book about how blogs and user-generated Web sites are destroying the culture, says those who want to remain anonymous are increasingly being “marginalized” online. On sites like Twitter, he adds, anonymous users who are indiscriminately nasty rarely accumulate many followers.
“In the future, I think there will be pockets of outrageously irresponsible, anonymous people who will congregate in dark corners of the Internet, like on dark streets in disreputable parts of cities in the middle of the night,” says Keen, who wrote The Cult of the Amateur. “But for the most part, we will have cleansed ourselves of the anonymous. It will increasingly be something like smoking, which is looked down on.”
Seen at NPR
