Tyra Banks talks about anonymity

Tyra Banks' talk show may not be the most accurate place to get information from but in a recent episode I thought the issue of anonymity, which we have discussed in lectures and readings, was relevant to her show. The show was about a group of people who were 'addicted' to making comments about celebrities online, anonymously. Tyra then got the audience to anonymously write a comment about the four guests, to see how they felt when it was them who was being talked about. All of the guests argued that they only do it as a way of expressing their self identity. They discussed that it was a way for them to express how they feel but so no one knows who they are. Tyra went on to tell them that she only saw insecurities in their comments and that what they were expressing for celebrities was really how they felt about themselves.

Although the Tyra show is not going to prove any of these issues at hand, I did find a lot of what they were discussing similar to Kennedy's reading in the course book where he discussed anonymity and how important it is for online communities to enable users to be able to disguise parts of their identity that they may want to hide from their real life identities. I thought this related particularly to one of the guests on the Tyra show who was particularly interested in commenting on pictures of celebrities whom he believed to be gay, he discussed that because he himself was gay then everybody else should admit to being gay. The outcome of his argument was that he was anonymously telling all of these celebrities to 'come out of the closet', where he was not actually admitting the truth about his sexuality at the same time. All up this showed me that online anonymity is an issue that everybody is dealing with, whether it be positively or in this case negatively.