Hail Anonymity! Is it time to say goodbye to Facebook and Twitter?

The Internet, as we know it, today is replete with countless number of social networks. Apart from mainstream networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, a new kind of social networking is on the rise, which is anonymous social networking. It is devoid of any personal details, essentially marking your presence and all your activities online. As weird as it sounds, social networking or interaction isn't exactly impossible when you're anonymous. In traditional social media channels, you have to have a profile of some sort before presenting your thoughts out to the world, however, in the anonymous social networking, it's quite the opposite.

Your messages, photos or location becomes the identifying characteristic. Popularity of apps like Yik Yak, Secret and Whisper can testify to the fact that people love interacting in social circles anonymously or without revealing as little as possible. But as is the case with the every new idea the world has ever seen, it comes with its fair share of concerns.

Anonymous Social Networking catching up so much interest makes sense in a post Snowden society, where people realized that their traditional networks with their real names and identities were being tracked by their governments. It seems like a great idea to finally let out what you have to say no matter how different, weird or plain out terrible it is without actually compromising your true identity.

Looksee App takes a similar approach implemented a little differently. The idea behind this app is that your photographs, not your words, face or education speaks for you, and facilitates communication on a totally anonymous visual plane. If you’re fairly modest about your level of social networking, but like to explore and post without going public, Looksee is a great start. You can be as low profile as you want to be without revealing too much to a large universe of strangers, but still form connections with photographers you admire if they’re interested in your work. It provides almost limitless scope for content discovery and the resulting communication or collaboration.

But then again it can go all wrong
Anonymous communication platforms and pre-teenage to adolescent brain don’t mix all that well. Judging by the fate of Ask.fm, whose anonymity led to cyber bullying and over half a dozen suicides. Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this. Yik Yak, an anonymous messaging app which relies on your current location for the target audience, allowed people to make anonymous posts for nearby people without using any identity. Mischievous minds came into play and there were bomb threats all over the place. New forms of social interaction are a welcome thing, but something as serious as a bomb blast threats or kill threats are no joke. The application was banned at a number of schools following which the app reinvented its structure to disable it automatically near middle and high schools across the US.

Anonymity is a great thing, the reason why these sorts of applications were conceptualised was to express your thoughts without facing any judgement, but you can’t yell “Bomb” at an airport or a crowded theatre. There’s a line that has to be drawn.

“We want to make sure that, two years down the line, Yik Yak is what you use when you’re in a new location – it’s what you pull up to see what’s going on around you. We want to grow and we want to be huge, but we also want to make sure that we’re creating sustainable, good communities, too. That’s number one our list. We didn’t create Yik Yak so that people could target other individuals,” says Brooks Buffington (Co-Founder of Yik Yak)

Sure, the intent wasn’t wrong but the implications were too far-fetched as is the case with the Internet of Things. Sadly, in private people do like to read shameful secrets, messages and other content that people publish on account of anonymity. It opens a new channel for people who want to discuss things which might be too impolite to post or talk about publicly and when any new application or service caters to this need, its popularity soars.

It’s definitely interesting to see creative and interesting ideas that employ technology to connect us in this dynamic, interconnected and always online world. Some concepts are just destined to fail while some need quite a bit of experimentation to see how ideas will function in real world. Anonymous social media clearly lies in the latter category for good reasons. Intellectual privacy is something everyone should protect and respect. With more incorporation of technology in our lives and the apparent shift of majority of our workflow on to the digital world, we need to have a clearer idea of when to stop and when to not.