Anonymity is a curse of our current culture, a legacy handed to us by our predecessors. With identity comes responsibility and obligation; with anonymity comes release from accountability and what seems to be an unfortunate rise in discourtesy bordering on the criminal. Examples of distancing ourselves from social responsibility abound, but two easy ones to pick out are driving and using the internet.

I firmly believe that road rage is a direct cause of the anonymity brought about by 1) the incredible mass of cars on the road that represent dozens or even hundreds of communities 2) the complete lack of ability to identify each other and hold each other accountable for actions on the road. Do you flip off your neighbor routinely? Would you cut-off your co-worker in the fast lane if you had to see them tomorrow? Do you box out fellow church members when merging, then giggle about it?

We use the police to act as interpreters in this arrangement, using the esoteric numbers and letters on our license plates, but the act of making others answerable is punitive and rare. We could police ourselves if a medium by which we had to know each other was in place. Granted, there is a good reason that Charles Manson can't take a glance at my car and find out where I live. And I'm not sure I've got a solution; I'm just identifying the problem in a different way.

Email, of course, is even more anonymous than the road, even sometimes polynomous, which amounts to the same thing without accountability and identity. Flaming someone on a forum or board is easy when you don't know who it is or, more to the point, they don't know who you are. Yeah, yeah, we could talk about the inalienable freedoms of the internet for a while but, sorry, I have to take an hour out to clean my Inbox of spam from faceless emailers from around the globe. Oh and did I mention my employer is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on spam protection this year because we can't identify who is sending this crap out?

As we progress technologically as a global culture, we will have to find methods by which we can know each other. It's a hackneyed phrase, but global village has connotations I like. Life in a medieval village sucked in ways too numerous to count, but you knew who did things to you and for you. Evil was done under cover of night, with a mask, not doing 80 down the interstate, or sitting at a desk in an office with a network connection.

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Vent Archive 1 - Talking With Your Eyes Wide Shut