The Anonymous World

It has been quite sometime that I have been thinking about a word. A word, whose history is not known to me in exact date or place.

‘Anonymous’ – Cambridge defines the word as “made or done by someone whose name is not known or not made public” or “having no unusual or interesting feature.”

I came across the word during my last days on the famous, now lost, social networking site – Orkut. At first it was a cool feature. I could hide my identity and abuse or attack anyone who usually attacked me. However the feature was never used. Instead a lot of ‘anonymous’ replies and a lot of 'anonymous' interactions happened.

A feeling of being harassed by unknown people and a sick-feeling arouse. I instantly changed my settings, made sure there are no 'anonymous' interactions or replies and friend requests came across.

Although to make sure that the traffic was being received, I had to make the change back to open ids and anonymous replies. The result - one developed an ignorant, cold, nonchalant attitude.

In school, we were taught that interactions and discussions enhanced our knowledge grow and we learnt from the bad and the good of the opposite person. Here on the web world what we learnt that abusing is the coolest form of interaction that can happen and one with the ‘anonymous’ can escape counter-attack or counter-attack abuses precisely, easily. Bottom-line, we stopped interacting and strongly ignored 'anonymous' replies, comments and interactions.

The word 'anonymous' came into the web-world in 2003, if I am not wrong. Did it hit instant popularity? I have no clue about it. Although a lot of 'anonymous' activities were observed by me.

In 2011, the year which concluded it has grown to such an extent that everywhere the replies appear as ‘anonymous’.

Is this an identity crisis of people or the cool thing or a fear of speaking the truth and escaping from attack and most recently hacking.

It is so easy to point out such issues but real hard to find the solutions. The most appropriate solution can be giving up and removing the option ‘anonymous’ from the web-world or any other type of world where it is available.

There has been a lot said and written on the particular word and its usage. Pranksters to hackers. A kind of activism. What it is the need of such a group or word? Where is the end?

This is one of the few such features of the internet that are most hated and like one rotten apple has been rotting the whole popularity of World Wide Web.

They are like terrorists, waiting to pound over us, forcing us to listen to them and agree to their words.

The above is the screenshot of a video by the famous Anonymous group. Here is the link - Anonymous

If we are to progress and make our lives better then we have to change such features and make the ones who question the abilities of the internet change side by side.

Now the reason behind having such a group? What is the mindset of the people who form this group?

Inability to express freely? Or as stated before they are like a set of people forcing people to accept or agree whatever they do?

Collection of news on 'Anonymous' group

My conclusion will be, we need to think about 'anonymous' and 'anonymity' as a whole. I don’t think no one will agree that 'anonymous' is good factor or a positive feature that is keeping the web alive or will keep it alive. Yes we can choose to ignore and live our life but however, don’t we already ignore a lot of stuff on the internet? Then the thing will be that from the anonymous world we will be changing into the nonchalant world.