Online and anonymous: A key facet of Web culture is a double-edged sword

Anonymity is great!

Except when it’s not.

(John Adkisson/Reuters) - One Internet user’s embrace of anonymity might be another’s idea of boorish behavior.

It shields the whistleblower from blowback and the deep-background source from getting deep-sixed. It helped women publish novels way back when . . . when that was a pretty novel idea. But it can also embolden the kook to get kookier and the racist to get . . . well, you get the picture.

This whole matter of anonymity — its merits and demerits — flares up from time to time, and this is one of those times. Twin sparks — one from the West and one from the East — are nudging America to consider anonymity as a thing well worth considering.

Out West, it’s Tina Fey jumping on anonymous Internet commenters hating on her. Back here in the East, it’s our very own dearly departing Washington Post ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, decrying nasty, offensive behavior in the comments section of articles on the newspaper’s Web site, including, most recently, some unsavory remarks about a story regarding persistent ranting over first lady Michelle Obama’s derriere. Pexton is suggesting that readers who want to say a thing or two on www.washingtonpost.com should be required to identify themselves first.

Fey and Pexton, whose thoughts have gotten the viral launch that only a lengthy discussion on NBC’s “Today” show can provide, veer toward an age-old question. Does anonymity make us good? Or does it make us bad? And now that we’ve had a good long while to get used to splashing around online, there’s another question to ponder: Does the Internet make it easier for us to be anonymously bad or anonymously better?

The answer isn’t so simple. Consider 4Chan, a hugely popular and emphatically anonymous Internet board that began as a place to discuss Japanese anime and has swelled into dozens of boards focused on everything from “science & math” to “Sexy Beautiful Women.”

The site can get raunchy. The posters can get rough with each other. Anonymity has the effect of making the users less inhibited, said Michael S. Bernstein, who studied the site’s “/b/ - random” board with colleagues at MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain. That lack of inhibition has led to plenty of “gore, pornography and racism,” Bernstein, now a computer science professor at Stanford University, said in an interview.

But amid all the offensive behavior, Bernstein and his fellow researchers also found that anonymity had a lot of positive effects. One of the most notable was the creation of a culture that fostered experimentation and new ideas. Since no names were being used, the users felt more comfortable taking risks. They’ve ended up contributing to the creation of an Internet culture and to a proliferation of memes.

The site is often credited as starting the lolcats craze, those ubiquitous photos of cats with commentary superimposed over the images, Bernstein said. It’s also the source of the Internet phenomenon of rickrolling. You haven’t been rickrolled? That’s when someone sends you a link promising to be one thing, but in reality you’re directed to a video of the awesomely awful Rick Astley song, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”