The very first time I used the internet, I was twelve years old, and we had an Acorn RISC PC (now, sadly, obsolete) and a 28.8k modem. My dad showed me how it worked, and my first search was for “gerbils” – my obsession at the time.

A year or so later, I’d discovered Star Trek fanfiction. A year or two after that, I got my first email address. Most of the people I’d come across online – like fanfiction authors – didn’t use their real names so, I didn’t either. Having nothing witty to put, I used the name of the main character from the novel I was writing at the time.

And, for most of my teens, my experience of the internet was, to a greater or lesser extent, anonymous. It felt private, not very different from reading a book or watching television in the evenings.

The internet feels private because we tend to be online alone, at home. But it’s also very public, with millions of people potentially being able to access anything you put online. Conversations on Skype or MSN can be recorded. Your rants on Twitter are being achieved by the Library of Congress.

We behave differently online. Researchers have done various studies and surveys on this, but I suspect it’s something that anyone who’s used the internet will have realised. We obviously consume content differently (my experience of reading the Guardian online is significantly different from reading the physical newspaper). But the difference is strongest when we interact.

For a long time, I’ve been interested in who we are online verses who we are offline. (I’m going to avoid using words like “virtual” and “real world” here, because it reinforces our sense that the internet isn’t quite real.)

Here are a couple of propositions. You’re more than welcome to disagree (that’s what the comments are for).

• We’re less inhibited online (introverts especially)
• We have a tendency to forget that our online interactions are public

Losing Your Inhibitions

When I was fifteen, I made an online friend through the chatroom of a Doctor Who fan group. (This was way before Doctor Who got revived by the BBC.) This guy worked in something computer-related in the United States. We used to chat on Messenger. I found that, online, I was sillier, funnier, more confident, even occasionally flirty (I’m not sure I realised this at the time, only in retrospect).

I’ve always been a bit of an introvert. I was confident enough in class at school, but awkward and ill at ease in social situations. The online world was one where I could be chatty, without being afraid of ridicule. After all, if someone says something mean online, you can just log off.

Apparently, this isn’t just because I’m an introvert, or even because I’m rather English…

Cyberspace is a disinhbitor. The disinhbiting effect of cyberspace is a universal phenomenon, no peculiar to the English. People from many cultures find that online they are more open, more chatty, less reticent than they are face-to-face or even on the telephone.

(Kate Fox, Watching the English, pg 226 – Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk)

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not sure it’s either. I think it’s something which we’re all aware of, and which we can consciously choose to use. I like making new friends online, because it’s an easy way for me to make connections and chat – and there’s always the option of meeting in the physical world once first contact has been made online.

On the other hand, lacking inhibitions can mean lacking good judgement. I’ve had some conversations online that I wish I’d never had. I’ve said things which would have been better left unsaid. Because talking to someone who’s represented only as text can feel very much like talking to yourself.

It’s great to feel uninhibited and free to be yourself. But it’s good to check in with yourself once in a while: Would I say this face-to-face? Would I do this in the physical world?

Your Boss Can See Your Drunken Facebook Photos

There have been several high-profile cases in recent years which reveal how information we might consider “private” (shared with a group of friends) is actually shared with the world. For instance, in 2008, the 18-year old footballer Ashley-Paul Robinson, a Crystal Palace player at the time, posted on Facebook that he was hoping for a transfer. Unfortunately, his Facebook settings allowed everyone in the London network to see this news – breaking it to the press a bit pre-emptively. A Crystal Palace source said that:

It’s pretty embarrassing for the club that this guy is telling the world he’s looking to leave the club. Perhaps someone should tell him to be a bit more private about what he’s putting on the internet.

But this is the point. We’re not very private about what we put online, because we tend to forget that the whole world may have access to it.

I doubt any of my readers are footballers. Even so, venting steam about your boss/teachers/parents on Facebook may well cause trouble. It might feel like the same conversation you’d have in the pub with mates, but it’s being conducted in a public space.

From failbooking.com

At South by South West, dana boyd gave a keynote where she talked about privacy and publicity online, and one of her points which stuck with me was that we generally expect some level of “privacy by obscurity”. This was why there was such an outcry when Facebook started publishing a people’s updates directly to their friends’ news feeds. I might be happy for people to check my profile and see that I’ve, say, changed my political views – but I may not want this information being pushed out to everyone who’s added me as a friend.

When I first had a blog, aged 18, I used to post rambling, drunken entries about what I was up to at university. I think all of about three people read this blog. Imagine my horror when my dad found it and started reading it! He thought it was hilarious when I protested that it was “not for parents” to read – because, as he pointed out, “the whole world can read it, isn’t that the point?”

Well, there are some things you might share with the world, but not with your mum and dad.

My point is that we don’t have a very strong emotional grasp on the privacy/publicity implications of the internet. We might know in theory how private our data is or isn’t (though, as dana boyd pointed out, a lot of people really have no idea) – but we’re not always prepared for the emotional consequences of certain people getting their hands on certain bits of information.

Nowadays, I try not to put anything online which I’d mind my family seeing. That includes, for instance, not saying anything about them which I wouldn’t want to say to their faces.

I’m not suggesting that every time you Tweet, you ask yourself, would I be embarrassed if this got quoted in a national paper? But I think all of us – and especially those who, like me, do business online – could do with taking a step back once in a while, and checking whether we’re happy with our “public face”.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I’ve got plenty more to say about the internet and how online space changes things – for good and for bad – so feel free to pose any questions or thoughts that have come up for you, and I’ll try to address them in a future post.