Christopher Walken was a victim of an online impersonator, but are fictional fakers such a problem?

As our use of the internet evolves, questions of online and offline identity become more important. Maybe a little mild deception might be fun?

Tuesday night saw the latest meeting of Manchester’s Social Media Cafe. One of the talks was run by Futuresonic festival founder Drew Hemment. Although the talk was supposed to be about the festival (which incidentally includes a rather excellent-looking Social Technologies Summit), it ended up becoming a fascinating group debate about online identity.

In the past people tended to hide their real identities behind an online pseudonym. The real people behind screen names like ‘CrazyGirl82′ or ‘DonkeyMan’ a few years ago would have hated for people to know too much about their true identity. An emerging trend over the past year (perhaps inspired by the ‘real names only’ policy of Facebook) has been for people to be transparent about their identity online.

It’s another example of what I’ve previously called ‘The Naked 21st Century‘ – the inevitable shift to a totally open, much less private world. If we’re using our real names online there’s nothing ‘fake’ to hide behind. As disconcerting as that may sound, it does have its benefits. A ‘real name’ Twitter account, for example, can seem more trustworthy than someone who hides behind an abstract identity.

On the other hand, if real names are the norm then it becomes easier to pretend to be someone else. Twitter is littered with fake celebrity accounts run by people who presumably just like the attention. Funnily enough, it’s been down to the real celebrities on there, like Jonathan Ross and Philip Schofield, to weed out the charlatans thanks to their heaving address books.

While we may be skeptical about celebrity accounts, what about ‘normal people’ online? How do we know someone is real? One woman taking part in the debate on Tuesday astounded me by talking about the lengths she went to in creating a fake online identity for “research purposes” related to her job in PR.

Her fake identity had its own email address, social network accounts, political views. How she got around the problem of needing photos I’m not sure but she claimed her fictional character fooled a lot of people into ‘befriending’ a figment of someone’s imagination.

How would you feel if you discovered that someone you had been talking to online was just a fictional character? Personally, I think I’d be a little upset at first, but in the grander scheme of things does it really matter? When I debate issues with people online it’s just an exchange of ideas – a bit of mental exercise, if you will. In most cases it doesn’t amount to anything, it’s just a debate, no more and no less. It really doesn’t matter whether who I’m talking to is real or not.

So, in most cases people’s online identities are irrelevant. People may feel a little cheated if they discover the truth, but unless the fake identities are used for illegal purposes what’s the harm?

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that creating an alternative identity online might be a fun exercise! I’m tempted to give it a go. Trying to express opinions that are at odds with my own might help me understand other people’s views. Why not try it yourself and let me know how you get on?

[Image Credit: Christopher Walken by David Shankbone]

Since 2003 groups of people have been converging on a public space, performing a predetermined act and then dispersing again. From mass pillowfights to silent discos, these events have captured the imaginations of a lot of people. They’re certainly fun to take part in and, hey, people like to be in on the next big thing don’t they?

The irony here is that the Flashmob was designed by Bill Wasik at Harper’s Magazine as “a social experiment designed to poke fun at hipsters and to highlight the cultural atmosphere of conformity and of wanting to be an insider or part of ‘the next big thing’.” (Wikipedia). Well Bill, that backfired didn’t it?

Here in the UK we seem to be going through a spate of Flashmobs at the moment. Mobile phone network T-Mobile has been running a series of Flashmob-themed ads shot in a railway station and imitators have been jumping on the bandwagon, forcing police to waste their time overseeing these events when they could be catching criminals. Sometimes these railway station events attract hundreds of people causing huge inconvenience to people who actually want to catch a train. Other times they attract more police than Flashmobbers – a huge waste of resources.

So, what if Flashmobbers used their energies more usefully? I can see two ways this could be done:

1. Demonstrations

Political demonstrations tend to attract a lot fewer people than they could. A lot more people opposed the war in Iraq than bothered to take part in demonstrations about it. Whether people just don’t have time or whether they’re put off by the Socialist image of most demos, maybe they’d be more inclined to participate if it was more fun?

If two thousand people turned up in Trafalgar Square, laid on the ground and played dead for five minutes before getting up and dispersing they’d make more of a bold statement than just another SWP/Respect-dominated rally with megaphones and angry students. It would probably be reported more widely too. This idea has been in use for a few years in Belarus.

2. Positive social impact

Flashmobs tend to be narcissistic affairs but what if all that human energy was put to positive use. You might not have a lot of spare time to improve your local environment, but if lots of people came together they could very quickly achieve a major effect with little individual effort. Charities have used Flashmobbing as a promotional tool but how about using it as a way of actually getting things done?

I asked my followers on Twitter for their ideas of the kinds of things that could be achieved. George Veletsianos, a Lecturer of Digital Technologies, Communication & Education at Manchester University, pointed me in the direction of Carrotmobs in the Netherlands who promote consumer ethics. Musingsonamac suggested that Flashmobs could “clean graffiti, pick litter (less lasting) deliver soup to homeless – frankly all manner of social good!”. Gary Williams meanwhile said “Imagine if (Flashmobbers) had all given their (train) fare to charity instead, or visited an unloved patch of land and planted some wild flower seeds”.

It’s a beautiful thought. It’s just a shame that positive citizenship isn’t as ‘cool’ as dancing around promoting a mobile phone network.

[Image credit: Giezzy]

Most of the privacy-related stories that have made the news in recent times fall into one of the following categories:

1. Human Error: While computers get better at recording what we do, humans are no less likely to make mistakes than in the past. Therefore, we regularly hear of CDs full of medical records being dropped in hospital carparks, government laptops being left on trains and the like.  Take a look at this example concerning HSBC, for example.

2. Businesses and organisations being slow to adapt: Privacy policies at many businesses and organisations are simply not up to scratch. Hence government departments have lost public records in the post when CDs containing data have failed to reach their destination. Also fitting into this category is Google Streetview, a Google Maps feature which is coming to the UK soon.  Darren Waters at the BBC has more on that here.

3. Courts favour commercial interests over privacy: Just look at the Youtube case yesterday as an example. Viacom will be getting all the records of every video every Youtube user has ever looked at (although I like this suggestion of how Google could rebel against the decision).

4. We give our privacy away freely: Many people simply aren’t aware enough of privacy issues when it comes to social networking and will happily expose personal details on sites like Myspace and Facebook. What’s more, how many members of the public are aware of how much data they give away when they search using Google?

So – what can we do in the face of all this? Run away and hide up a mountain away from prying digital eyes and live the life of a cave-dwelling hermit? Fight for tighter privacy laws?

My personal response to all of this is different. I believe that idea of personal privacy (as we currently understand it) is dying. While laws could be put in place to better protect it, the digital world is constantly changing and will grow its way around any laws that get put in its way. In a world where information is freely available anywhere, personal privacy may no longer have the same meaning we’ve been used to. We may have to get used to much of our personal data being ‘out there’.

We’ll be exposed, naked, and we might just have to get used to it. Technology isn’t going to slow down any time soon. Just as humans had to adapt to many changes in the past, from the Ice Age to the Industrial Revolution, maybe we need to modify our definition of ‘private’ in the 21st Century.

[Image credit: rpongsaj on Flickr]