Advanced Essay #3: Nothing We Know is Real
Introduction:
It took me a while to find a topic relating to identity that I was really passionate about until I came across an article online that talked about how people were using ‘fake news’ to confuse and manipulate people. I thought this was interesting because it talked a lot about how our society is changing since the time when the internet was not as much of an asset to our everyday lives.
No one is real, an almost infinite number of fake people climbing through a tangled web. They give a feeling of worth to some insignificant person that lives on another side of the planet. This lets us hide from ourselves, the people that we want to become can now be who we really are, just by hiding behind a screen. Now we can be defined by what a number of pixels and some piece of hardware says about us.
Now that the internet has become a piece of everyday life, people are allowed to live through the persona they create for themselves. It has become a part of life, that we must look at a person we meet through the internet and have to wonder whether they are real or not. Though some have different reasons for lying about who they are, some just want to create the person they wish they were in real life, others use it to manipulate. There is still one thing all of these people have in common--they can hide from the rest of the world without having to get out of bed. You can do anything, be anyone.
Along with the fact that you can no longer trust people you meet on the internet, your activity is also constantly being tracked. Advertising companies can learn anything about you, take your search history and create a completely personalized viewing experience for each person based on what information they are able to dig up about you. It is almost something out of George Orwell’s 1984, which illustrates a dystopian world in which none of your actions are private.
Journalist Curtis Wallen from The Atlantic writes a fascinating article dating back to July in 2014 about his experience creating a fake identity online, in which he talks about the way anyone can access information about you. In his writing he says “It’s not an exaggeration to say everything you do online is being followed. And the more precisely a company can tailor your online experience, the more money it can make from advertisers.” This tells us how almost everything that you see on the internet everyday is an effort for an advertising company somewhere to make money off you.
The depressing truth about what happens today is that identities are created or stolen, and it is becoming harder and harder to weed your way through and find real people. There are websites that are used for dating all over the internet that help match people up, hopefully leading to a relationship. A big fear between people that use these dating sites is that someone is lying about who they actually are in order to attract people to them. They might do this by using a picture of a model instead of themselves, or by speaking in a way that might attract a certain type of person, instead of speaking as you might in real life. This has been a dangerous game for people to play for a long time, though it is becoming easier and easier to get away with. Anyone can sit and hide behind a screen and pretend to be anyone they want, and usually without any repercussions.
Another recent issue that connects to false identity is fake news. People who claim to be high power officials spread news that has been completely made up in order to make a point of their own. Through social media sites like Facebook we are handed a lot of information about what is happening in the world, and it turns out that most of it is not true, but because we see it there and hear it from something we trust, we automatically believe that it is the truth. Pui-Wing Tam a journalist for The New York Times writes in a recent article from early January 2017, “The phenomenon of fake news is reinforced by powerful figures who cite the false information and help spread it. That includes Mr. Trump himself, who has invoked fake news when it has suited his needs.” Now we are faced with the issue of not knowing what is real or not online, are the people real, is what we see and hear actually accurate?
This leaves us as a population with the question: How has the use of the internet and the ability to have access to the largest portion of the world we have ever had, changed the way we think of our own identity, and the way we perceive others? This is a question that should be explored deeper throughout the next coming years because it has led to issues like cyberbullying, which has allowed people the right to act like monsters towards one another online because they have the protection of the screen between them. The little monitoring that goes on is also staggering, there are little to no consequences for people who commit these types of crimes over the internet.
Throughout the coming years I hope that we are able to find a way of solving this problem, this issue that leading us into the world that George Orwell foretold, where we can trust no one. Identity means nothing anymore because through the internet we are able to be whomever we want to be.
Wallen, Curtis. "How to Invent a Person Online." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 23 July 2014. Web. 20 Jan. 2017. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/how-to-invent-a-person-online/374837/
Tam, Pui-Wing. "The Continued Creation and Dissemination of Fake News." The New York Times. The New York Times, 19 Jan. 2017. Web. 20 Jan. 2017.
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