Post-Facebook Social Media and Offline Identity
Quick thought! A couple of years ago it was very common to hear the line that the age of online anonymity and identity play was, essentially, over, and thanks to Facebook we were moving to a kind of social media where authenticity was the real currency and people’s social media identities would be tied to their real world identities.
And this is what has happened! On Facebook, anyway. That service is very tied to a consistent identity, as is LinkedIn.
But elsewhere the picture is a bit more complicated. It’s always hard to generalise from Twitter but I wouldn’t be surprised if real-world identities (real name usernames, identifiable photos) had plateaued there. Someone else has probably got your name, and the service is full of head and shoulder shots just like yours, so why NOT stand out?
And on Tumblr - which is nowhere near Twitter size, but which is growing and getting plenty of heat, anonymised user names are normal. There’s usually a tieback to real identity, but not always. Quora may be real-ID-driven, but Formspring is an uneasy, venomous but vibrant mix of the real and anonymous.
It strikes me that rather than ushering in an age of fixed online identities, Facebook has opened up the potential to loosen them a bit. It’s precisely because “everyone’s on Facebook” that it can act as a kind of solid day-to-day underpinning of online identity, allowing identity play and performance to happen elsewhere.
This isn’t quite anonymity - among Tumblr’s fuckyeah blogs, erotica blogs, inspirational blogs and general random-collections-of-shit blogs there are often links back to what else their compiler does. It’s more about the separation and performance of aspects of a self.
And crucially this is something Facebook can’t really replicate. Any new social service which launches based on real world IDs has to face the possibility that Facebook can and will clone it. New social services which don’t build in that link are - it seems to me - on more secure ground. They’ll never compete with Facebook but they won’t be squashed as easily either.
I think all of this is fairly cyclical too - Tumblr, for instance, has a very young userbase, it’s one of the social sites whose pioneer users mostly weren’t online in the old anonymous days and so it’s a generation discovering the thrill of internet identity shaping for themselves.
