Anonymity is the enemy of civility

As I read this in Seth Godin's "small is the new big", it reminded me that the anonymity of identity on the Internet is also an anonymity of truth and intent.

We not only don't know who's doing the posting but we also don't know how to measure its veracity.

Of course, measuring truth and intent can be difficult to determine even when communicating face-to-face, but at least you have the benefit of other senses to help interpret the message as well as the context in which it occurs.

Although obvious to many, still more of us continue to forget and be duped. We willfully suspend disbelief while perusing Internet web sites looking to find reasons for our choices.

Check the 'help wanted' ads on Craigslist, or your email spam folder, to see the prevalence of 'work at home' opportunities consisting of writing articles, reviews and tweets extolling the virtues of a product or company. These paid authors, with names and titles to thinly veil their true anonymity, quickly learn to include some minor criticism in their reviews to evoke a sense of objectivity in the reader and garner the approval of their employer.

Web masters will confirm that captchas, an annoying type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer, are increasingly being compromised. It is no longer Internet 'bots' programed to decipher the captcha that are circumventing these attempts to remove the anonymity of visitors' personas. We now know it is often a human, paid to circumvent the challenge-response test and insert some useless post, not to add value for subsequent readers, but rather to trick search engines into giving the post's benefactor some advantage in search listings.

Maybe building a parallel Internet, as Mr Godin suggests, where no one is welcome unless they have a verifiable identity is the answer to promoting more civility and truth. In the mean time, businesses and professionals seeking to overcome their on-line anonymity and establish authenticity can publish content under their own name, on web sites using their actual name in the domain url, and registering their domain name using their real names.

The first step to offering value over the Internet is establishing an authentic identity. Nothing can establish an honest identity quicker than using your own, good name.