Perhaps few might know it, but January 1, 1983, is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Since then, a whole new digital vocabulary has been created. Surfing the net, websites, the dark web, domains, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, smartphones, tablets, browsing, cyberbullying, cyber criminality, spam, ransomware, hackers, phishing, and a whole plethora of other terms have become common parlance today.
As the internet developed and social media grew, people's online identities shifted increasingly away from their real-life personas. But how has this online influence changed us?
The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity does not understand; it is the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
I once saw a cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer, turning to another dog, and saying, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." It was the thrill of those early days when the internet, then a matter of slow dial-up connections and clunky text-only "bulletin boards", provided a way for people to re-engineer their identity online. Men could pose as women, the young as old, amateurs as experts, and country loners as sophisticated urbanites.
These days, the internet has been instrumental in the global spreading of fake news, but perhaps one other negative and extremely dangerous development that is not highlighted enough is the fact that the internet has made it digitally possible to fake one’s real identity and character and to disguise and blot out the total negatives of one’s personality. Perhaps one could sum it up as the fake and defective alter ego effect.
The internet has given us a way to re-engineer our identity almost continually and discover what it is like to be someone very different from our "real" selves.
This is not new, of course. Through make-up, clothing, the music we like, the books we read, the opinions we express, the people we vote for, and so on forever, we have always been busy defining and redefining our identity.
But, before the internet, that busyness took place in the small arena of our friends, family, and colleagues, and indeed, much of it was about developing separate identities to show to each group.
The internet can unhealthily provide us with a false and surreal sense of well-being. Social media has, in part, become a huge exercise in public judgement. And, as anyone who has been shamed or bullied online knows, it can be incredibly powerful. In small groups of individuals who know each other, the clash between how we see our identity and how others see it can be managed. Managing our identity on the internet takes much more work.
You see many people today checking their social media profiles several times a day, taking them away from the physical world around them. Particular moments have become 'good content' for social media followers, almost like the photographing and sharing of a cool time is more important than actually appreciating it in real life.
Through likes, comments, ratings, and so on, we receive almost instantaneous feedback on the adjustments we make to our identity, and these then become part of our identity itself as other people can see them.
This is not quiet feedback from close friends, the traditional way that we understand how our identity is perceived. This is the opinion of the masses, as viewed by the masses.
The internet is heralded as being about connection. But in many ways, it has allowed us to disconnect our actions from their effects. How often do we, for example, consider the consequences of giving someone a low rating because we did not like the way he or she spoke to us?
As well as being a world of huge numbers, the internet is also about very high speeds. Churning big numbers very quickly is about the only thing computers are good at. And we humans are in danger of trying to keep up with it—a race we can never win.
This means that the world feels much faster than it did even a quarter of a century ago. The same effect was felt in the early days of the industrial revolution in the late 18th century.
We fret about replying quickly to emails and WhatsApp messages; we worry about not having instant answers to problems we face in life—the illusion created by Google—and we also flit very quickly between identities.
The internet has brought the opinions of others flooding into our own lives as never before, and it is threatening our ability to understand who we really are. We are all now connected by the internet, like neurons in a giant brain.
To discover our true selves, maybe it is time to disconnect. Not forever, as that would be throwing away the baby with the bathwater, but for significant periods during our days, weeks, and months. Because with disconnection comes quiet, and with quiet comes the ability to reflect.
Dr Mark Said is a lawyer