When you enter a store to buy a magazine, who you are, as well as the attributes of who you are, are public. The cashier can see what you look like, maybe a video has recorded your purchase. The cashier may not know your name, but it is the nature of real world transactions that they are public like this. If you entered the store wearing a mask, you would be treated very differently. Or if you tried to hide your face from the video, people would be suspicious.
Cyberspace is just the opposite. Rather than choosing what to hide, in cyberspace, people choose what to show. One can have an email address with one's name. But it is not terribly odd to have an address like "JackRabbit@aol.com" -- an address that doesn't announce your name when you use it. But even if an email does announce your name, everything else about you is hidden -- until you choose to reveal what is hidden. In a well known New Yorker cartoon, the point is made quite well: Two dogs sitting at a computer terminal, and one says to the other, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." In real space, they do.
This difference has been a boon to much of the business of cyberspace: On-line services have discovered that what real world citizens want from cyberspace is a place where they can talk. Chat-rooms and on-line discussions have become the single most important part of on-line systems. And each evening, millions of Americans spend hours talking to people they may never meet, about a world of topics ranging from politics to personal relations.
For many, what is important about these conversations is that one gets to control who one is. Many find this part of cyberspace the most liberating. Here a woman gets to speak without her voice being heard as a "woman's voice." Here a senior citizen gets to say something without people's prejudices about age coloring how messages are received. Cyberspace is in this sense the ultimate democracy, where arguments get heard for what they say, and not for who says them.
Is this anonymity, or pseudonymity, legally protected? Let's first be clear on some terms. We should distinguish two ideas, which are closely related, from a third, which is ultimately quite important.
The related ideas are *anonymity* and *pseudonymity*; the third is *traceability*. If you join America On-line, you are assigned a screen name of your choosing. You may choose a name that resembles your name, (GeneV, for example) or you may choose a name that is totally unrelated to your name (Tio). If you choose a name unrelated to your name, but use this screen name consistently, in on-line chat areas, or in posting messages to discussion groups, this name becomes your pseudonym. It is not your name, but the character who has that name becomes known. We expect a certain consistency in what this pseudonym might say, just as we expect a certain consistency in George Eliot novels.
A pseudonym, however, is different from anonymity. Say, on AOL, you wanted to post a message anonymously. You therefore create a screen name called ANON3222. You then post a message with that screen name, and then delete the screen name. Now you have posted a message from a name that people will not associate with any particular character. It is a posting that speaks only with its words. Next time: More on anonymity, pseudonymity, and traceability.
authors:
| Larry Lessig | David Post | Eugene Volokh |
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