Airports always make me a bit wary of people around me (-- it's just the paranoia in me) but the ready smile of a young woman, who looked Filipino, sitting beside me totally disarmed me (-- after a light pat on my back pocket assured me that my wallet is still there). It’s amazing how a complete stranger in a foreign country instantly elevates you to the status of a friend solely on the perception that you possess-- even remotely, an assemblage of racial traits close to his or her own. The woman closed the lid of her cheap ten-inch Intel Atom powered low-resolution netbook on her lap and told me her name was HotChik. It turned out, I discovered later without asking, that HotChik was her Twitter name. When I told her that I too am on Twitter. Her eyes got wide; she leaned in, feigning interest apparently assessing me if I have the potential to be an avid follower or if I’m interesting enough to be followed. When it became obvious to her that I have no intention of sharing my Twitter name, her eyes became clouded with disinterest. She seemed distracted or annoyed. She turned her attention to her netbook; opened the lid and deftly ran her fingertips on the banged-up keyboard; after a while her eyes focused on me again. Her face lit up like a contestant in a TV game show. She said she’s on Facebook, too. Then lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, she said in Facebook she uses her real name. I could see her lips move but I don't hear any sound, my mind has drifted three sentences ago.
Right there is a snap shot of the changing landscape of our virtual world. The mask-ball party in the Internet is winding up. Where people led double lives, real and virtual, now they are shedding their masks to lead single lives again. Anonymity have allowed people to reveal their true selves even if their true selves aren’t their best selves. Still anonymity provided solace and people were emboldened to nevertheless share their lives assured that the rest of humanity would remain clueless as to who they really are (anonymity has strong links with porn sites, which for most people was their first interaction with the Internet). But now-- because of Facebook and Twitter, people yearned not to be liberated from their boring daily lives but curiously to be more deeply embedded in them.
Facebook made cyberspace honest and more like the real world: dull but civilized. All that stuff that the Internet enabled us to leave behind, all the trappings of our ordinary bourgeois existence, we take it with us on Facebook. The face, the name and the life posted on Facebook is real. It’s who we are (or, at least, most of us are). Facebook has simply made anonymity pointless.
On the other hand, the Tweeter micro-blogging community actually encourages-- mainly due to its format, identity deception and trolling and thus harbors in its bosoms two distinct types of internet denizens: narcissists who have revealed themselves as their true selves; and, the last vestiges of the bal masqué pretenders. Those who have revealed themselves hold the view that their everyday lives and opinions are interesting enough for other people to follow even as most of what they twit are blatant lies; and, those who are still anonymous are latent stalkers, posers (-- including those who take on the virtual persona of real people they hate or are presently obsessed with) and cyber-saboteurs/anarchists.
