Flossie Versus Facebook III

Well, the little sheepie has been banned again. It took quite a while but, in the end, someone decided that a sheep on Facebook had to be a fake account. It's kind of strange that it took so long, after all, Flossie has never pretended to be anything but a sheep, but he has always been polite and good-natured, just because that is the kind of sheep that he is.

Anyway, why was the sheepie banned? Basically, it seems to be that he posted no information which Facebook considered to be authentic and this raises a number of important questions.

Is it ethical to encourage people to post personal information online without a) that information being strictly necessary and b) without any warning or statement regarding how that information might be used or who that information might be made available to?

Remember, also, that this information is available across international boundaries and its use may not be subject to any enforceable law.

Identity theft and safety online are big issues. Not only are they big issues, but the associated threats are very real and easily underestimated. Social sites such as Facebook should have responsibilities to its members and should warn them of possible dangers. It is not possible to effectively police the web so, where possible, devices to protect the individual should be built in and people should be encoraged to use them - and not to blatently post details of their personal lives.

The punishment Flossie received was quite severe: with the disabling of his account, all his posts and all his friends were deleted. If this is meant to act as an example and teach others a lesson the lesson is clear: if you want to keep your account then you need to be able to prove your identity. Implicitly, if you provide enough information to prove your identity then you are possibly providing enough for someone else to use and 'borrow' your identity for their own purposes or, alternatively, to find you should they wish to do so.

And what is the purpose of this personal information anyway? It is merely to prove that we have a real existence outside the virtual world, but the social space Facebook occupies is entirely in cyberspace and, within cyberspace, a virtual sheep is as valid as anything else: he is still capable of expressing himself; still capable of dialogue and witty comment, and his sheepish perspective gives him a novelty value and something to be cherished rather than condemned. Indeed, many people (or two-leggies, as Flossie would say) are amused by the thought of chatting to a sheep online.

It is in crossing over from the virtual world to the real world that the greatest dangers lie. To be sure there are dangers within cyberspace itself, but it is most often in the confusion between the virtual world and the real world that real danger exists. Flossie does not cross that boundary and no one could expect him to. In the real world, Flossie is something else entirely and nothing recognisable as his virtual persona.

The truth is no one is quite what they seem online. Many people try to be and many others think that they are, and many others deliberately assume different identities for many varied reasons, but no one is quite what they seem.

The reason that no one is quite what they seem is very simple. What people seem to be is how they are perceived by others and the perception of others has been tuned to process information in the real world, not the virtual one. When we enter the virtual world we bring an emotional identity with us. This emotional identity is very much like the one we have in real life and includes our prejudices, our fears, our hopes and aspirations. Our emotions help and guide us socially in the real world, but our interaction with others is far more rich in that case and our emotions are tempered by the emotions that we meet and detect in others.

In the virtual world, communication is constrained by text and, to a certain extent, the ability to express oneself through the written word has a much greater impact than in real life. When it comes to emotions, generally, people express them selves quite badly in the medium available to them - ordinary words are quite crude and even a poet can be misread. Words also can have subtly different meanings across cultures and without visual and audible clues can easily be misunderstood.

When we add to this the emotional baggage that we individually bring into cyberspace, we find that those emotions within us do not meet any real resistance in the medium of text but, because we are emotional creatures and realise that we are dealing with other emotional creatures, we invest the text messages we receive with emotion - but the emotion has been generated from our own, modified slightly by what we have read, and not from the person with whom we are communicating. To put it simply, we confuse ourselves and what we see is far more to do with what we want to see, rather than what is really there.

The solution is not to be ourselves. If we are not ourselves, then a lot of the problems disappear. We can be whoever, or whatever, we like and it doesn't really matter as long as this identity remains in cyberspace. It is a lot better if this identity is not plausible as a real person, because there is less likelihood of accidentally causing confusion and misunderstanding. No one really understands how a sheep thinks or feels emotionally - we can only guess - and the knowledge that one is communicating with a sheep automatically puts us on our guard.

There is also less chance of fooling others. Those who wish to deceive and prey on others are more likely to choose a plausible persona to aid their deception. Children are vulnerable, even suggestible, but they are not stupid. A fourteen year old girl may well arrange to meet a fifteen year old boy she met online; she is less likely to arrange a tryst with a rather strange sheep.

Anyhow, Flossie believes that there is a terrific scope for a new type of social engineering here, which sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are completely missing out on. Their lack of imagination might prove their ultimate downfall.

Flossie is currently on Facebook as Horatio Brebis Noir, why not look him up?