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Real Name, an Anchor to the Real World

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Sun-mi Kim's picture

Brian Kerr's picture

I am sorry these comments

I am sorry these comments are so late. Hopefully they are still of some use to you.

General comments

I was interested in reading this paper because of the convention in some wiki of using real names, which is often stated but rarely explained or defended. (I think it is because of the situation of the first wiki, which was basically used to support the meetings of a professional group that met regularly in person.)

In your introduction you state that real names allows reputation to spread from the internet to the real world. But much of your paper describes a two-way process — where the “shadow of the future” or the possibility of real-world consequences to online activity helps to regulate behavior, but additionally pre-existing aspects of a participant’s identity, background, etc. influences their entry into and activity in an online community.

Beyond that, I think that your positioning of use of real names as a barrier to entry to a community, and the tension between community safety / policing and conservation of limited resources is effective, and well-illustrated by many of the details throughout the paper.

Specific comments

§ 1.1 and § 1.2: I was confused about the pseudonymous rooms in KW community. Is there a distinction between rooms where participants are identified by pseudonyms and rooms where they are identified by IP address? The distinction may be important since, if participants choose their own pseudonyms, they could maintain their pseudonym(s) over time, whereas IP address identifications would probably be more transient as participants log in from different networks, etc.

§ 1.3: in the situation you describe, use of real names would only help with spam if there was really a way to warrant someone’s name and/or keep them from signing up for multiple accounts. In other words, what keeps a spammer from creating a bunch of accounts under plausible-sounding yet fake names, and then abusing the trust of participants?

§ 3: this is very interesting. Part of the audience “present” in an asynchronous conversation is the set of people who could read or participate in the future, even if the conversation is transferred offline. Where do you think the outer limits of this social presence of others are? Is there a sense that a participant is writing for posterity, or just that within some timeframe (matching the typical pace of conversation in the particular community), other people will see and react to what is being written?

Sun-mi Kim's picture

Thanks for your detailed

Thanks for your detailed feedback. It is really helpful to me.  

Since you have several questions about my paper, I would like to address them here.

1.  In the KW community, real names are usually displayed, but where topics are sensitive, names are replaced with *** and IP addresses are displayed in the corner.  The reason I mentioned pseudonyms was that some people (popular writers or expert counselors) are called by their pseudonyms even though those names are not displayed.  So technically, you are right only IP addresses are the official profile of a user in so called an "anonymous room."

2.  At Amazon.com, I heard (or read) that they check a member’s name with that on the credit card she/he provides.

In Korea, many things are digitalized, and citizen unique numbers (like SSN in US) are one of them.  If you put your name and your citizen number, the information goes to the centralized system and comes back with validation result.
In either case,  it should be very difficult to make fake IDs. 

KW goes several more steps.  Once you register, you have to pass several tasks 1) you have to introduce yourself in a public room 2) Now they call you and make sure you are not (a very curious ) male or solicitor.   I think the purpose of this to make a barrier rather than to filter. 

3. I guess people are conscious of people in the current time and the hereafter.  Even your personal diary has always potential to become resources for history writers in the future.   When your name is displayed,  the distinction between online and offline is blurred, I believe.  In addition, it is known that a bad reputation spread quickly;  this might be partly explained by "six-degrees of separation" phenomenon.  For instance, even if you are talking to only one person, through social networks offline, your reputation/words "might" spread very quickly.  Therefore,  you are conscious of not only direct audience but also indirect audience that can reached through social (or other) networks of your current/future audience.