I was reading this interesting article on comment trolling on blogs. It breaks down people who comment on blogs into three categories; those who read and comment with something useful to say, those who “spam”-comment, hoping to generate traffic for their own web sites, and the trolls: those who comment to criticise/put down both the content and the authors (luckily (?) it seems that mobblog has very few of the first category and no trolls!). The interesting thing about the article was the pointer to this other one, which explains that this destructive behaviour may be explained by the lack of online identiy. Here is a quote from the article:

Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called “suicide baiting” – when someone threatening to jump from a high building is . Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley argues that much the same thing happens with online communication such as email. Psychologically, we are “distant” from the person we’re talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we’re more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.

What this seems to say is that we need a strong sense of online identity in order to promote social behaviour; hence the need to transfer concepts such as trust and reputation to the online world. However, on the other hand, people are worried about giving too much personal information when online. Fears of identity theft, data misuse (and so on) heavily influence who and how people interact with online.

So the question seems to be; where is the balance between the social utility of identity and the personal safety of anonimity? Interestingly enough, the issue of data governance was the subject of a talk that my dad gave recently!