In the current New Yorker there is a profile of Jaron Lanier, a virtual reality pioneer and technology writer, which contains this passage about social-networking sites: 

Teen-agers, Lanier writes, may vigilantly maintain their online reputations, but they do so “driven more by fear than by love.” In our conversation about Facebook’s face-recognition software, he added, “It’ll just create a more paranoid society with a fakey-fakey social life—much like what happened in Communist countries, where people had a fake social life that the Stasi could see, and then this underground life.”

People tend to be particularly cautious about putting things on Twitter, Facebook, or even tumblr if it will put them in a bad light to an employer, say. They’re more free to speak their minds or post what they want when they feel that they’re either anonymous (hiding behind a screenname) or there’s some privacy lock in place (‘friends only’ posts). This creates the dual society Lanier talks about here. I myself have refrained from posting certain ideas or thoughts that I thought a potential employer would frown upon or even confessions that could possibly cause me troubles with health insurance companies down the line. Even in email I hesitate at times. 

An interesting contrast is seen in Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story which is set in the near future and in which everyone is online in their basest selves—sex is talked and shown quite about openly. This brings up the possibility that if everyone is naked on the internet, then it’s like nobody is naked on the internet because it would no longer matter. I wonder if the Anthony Weiner photo scandal would still cause a stir in five years or even in one. 

Which way do you think we’re going? Towards a more uptight exterior internet with a secretive underbelly or towards a perpetual (rock out with your cock out) block party?