Redneck's breakdown is as follows:Dishonest and Name hidden – Coward
Dishonest and Name revealed – Psychopath
Honest and Name hidden – Whistleblower
Honest and name revealed – Transparent!!!These are good categories.
After thinking it over for a bit I came up with my own take on this:
Let's look at this breakdown in somewhat more detail.
"Real Person"
(Honest person using his or her own real name.)
This is the easy and obvious category. It's what most of us strive to be. Shown in my diagram is leadership guru Kate Sweetman, who was a guest on the Transparency Revolution podcast last month. Kate has an online persona that matches up very nicely with the person that you would meet in real life; and she uses her persona to tell the truth.There are scare quotes around the words "Real Person" simply because we should never lose sight of the fact that an online persona is a persona. We get the word "persona" from a Latin word meaning "mask," after all. All "real persons" are going to be a somewhat filtered and edited versions of the actual people. Some of the editing is for brevity, some for context, and some because we all like to put our best foot forward -- so we're selective about what we share and don't share online, how we phrase things, and so on.Also, we should note that being a "Real Person." is no guarantee as to what kind of person you are (not everyone is as awesome as Kate.) Charlie Sheen's online persona is a "Real person," for example. And as far as I know, so was Anthony Weiner's at the time he was sending out unsolicited crotch shots.
Masked Avenger
(Honest person using an assumed name.)
Redneck called this category "whistleblower," and I think he's on to something. However, not all whistleblowers are anonymous. Alexey Navalny is one excellent example of a whistleblower who uses his real name to spread the word about rampant government corruption.Of course, not all Masked Avengers are quite that heroic, but the point of this category is that there is a good reason for the mask. Moreover, we know that a Masked Avenger is wearing a mask. The masked Avanger is not trying to deceive anyone. The fake name says:"I have information to share, but I must remian anonymous in sharing it.
Big Fat Liar
(Dishonest person using his or her own real name.)
As noted above, Anthony Weiner was, as far as any of us know, a "Real Person" when sending out the Tweets that got him in trouble. He only became a Big Fat Liar when he started making claims that he had been "hacked."This is the normal trajectory, I would guess. I doubt few of us set out to create Big Fat Liar personas. It is something that people fall into. In Weiner's case, it was a sudden shift because he felt he had no other choice. For others, it probably happens more gradually, as exaggerations and distortions slowly give way to outright whoppers.
Sock Puppet
(Dishonest person using an assumed name.)
This is the category that fits "Amina," the online persona that blogger Tom MacMaster created for the blog "Gay Girl in Damascus." As we noted in last week's post, MacMaster would have the world believe that he is a Masked Avenger because he is providing real facts about the "situation on the ground." (Now had Amina been a real gay girl in Damascus, she would have been a Masked Avenger.)Unfortunately, claiming to be telling the real, deeper truth while lying about who you are rings pretty hollow with most of us. It's pretty hard to know where the actual honesty kicks in.Most people who employ sock puppets probably see themselves as being Masked Avengers, rather than the trolls and frauds they actually are.Of course, these categories exist along a continuum, and as we have noted, personas tend to move from one category to the other. Some folks probably bounce around quite a bit between them. There are no "Real Persons" so real that we would pull off the scare quotes, and few if any Sock Puppets that were started by people whose primary intent was to mislead others -- even MacMasters thought he was doing some good by way of misleading people.Having said all that -- I think we all know which side of the chart we want to be on.
Cross-posted from Transparency Revolution
