One thing I used to love about the internet before social media was all the active internet forums. There were no infinite-scroll feeds filled with mindless content and no distinct user profiles. We didn’t have any online personas to keep up. It was just about discussing topics with strangers across the world. You could be anyone, and other people could not know who you were because you didn’t need to disclose your age, face, or identity. I remember I loved it because it was anonymous – no profile picture, no names, no social prestige. It was only the content of the discussions that was in focus.
Now, the thing I dislike the most about our digital world is the need to keep up pretences. I don’t like that people have social media profiles, their personal “brands”, and curated personas. I know that I am a part of that problem, especially since I’ve been freelancing and have felt the need to build an online persona for professional purposes. But I see that even personal profiles, such as Instagram pages, are now so highly curated that they don’t feel authentic. And this behavior bleeds into the real world.
Social media profiles create a social sphere where you need to conform to societal norms. You’re no longer anonymous. The pictures and texts you post are visibly under your name, alongside your profile picture and photos of your personal life, displayed to your real-life social circle – connected to your physical presence in the world. It removes all the anonymity and forces you to care about what other people think.
So, what am I saying? Should we remove all personally identifiable information and allow for full digital anarchy? Of course, there are negative consequences of full anonymity – there are risks with unregulated internet content, with harmful behavior, and predatory people (especially against youth and vulnerable groups). We need some sort of content moderation. Those moderators used to be real humans who scanned, reviewed, and removed digital content. Now, we have AI algorithms that are very good at detecting, identifying, and removing harmful text-based content. We can utilize this.
With the advancement of automatic content moderation, I think we can return to online spaces that are not based on persons and egos, but on discussions.
I want to see a future where youth, adults, and the elderly are actively discussing topics with each other – anonymously. Social internet does not need to be about appeasing our egos, pretending to be some digital persona, uploading things for likes or comments. Pretending to be a “persona” that we are not is inauthentic because no person is as simple as their online persona. It’s a facade – and don’t we have enough of that in our social world already?
A social internet can instead be about sharing life experiences and views across the world. We could use the internet to foster a wider understanding of different cultures and countries. A social internet can be used to feed into a greater understanding of our diversity. The focus should be on sharing, being exposed, and exploring new music, literature, arts, ideas, and so on.
What I want is a social internet without personas, where there are no likes, followers, or online egos. I want to see this type of social platform in the future. I’m not sure how it will look. It’s hard to see anything going back to how it used to be, so perhaps it won’t look like our old internet forums. Perhaps it will be an entirely new form of social platform – but without the focus on our persons, and with all the focus on the topics of discussion.