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Anonymity is like a rare earth metal. These rare elements are an absolutely necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive, but the amount needed is a mere hard-to-measure trace. In larger does these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Take cadmium. Essential for life in very minute amounts; toxic in any significant amount. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishing small doses, it's good for the system by enabling the occasional whistleblower, confessional, or persecuted dissent in a tyrannical regime. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system, even a half-rotten system. I believe anonymity is essential. It is vital to a healthy society and market. Without the option of anonymity I believe a society would be less than optimal. Indeed I would fight vigorously to keep the option of being anonymous as an essential part of any society. It is both humane and wise. At the same time I think there can be too much anonymity at work. When it becomes a default option it poisons the community -- like a rare-earth metal. My argument is not against anonymity but against too much of it.

What do I mean by anonymity? An untraceable, unaccountable, undistinguishable agent. Someone who engages in an activity cloaked in the identity of the tag "anonymous." I do not mean a vegetable vendor in a market whose name you do not know, because that person is both distinguishable and potentially traceable.  I mean people who post using anonymous as a habit.

Anonymity is a concept that has existed throughout history. We all know of the anonymous letter, anonymous donations to charity and the anonymous tips to police. In every case, there is no connection between the message and an identifiable individual. The message stands alone. The advantage of anonymity is that the sender is without responsibility, or rather, they are only responsible for themselves. This can be beneficial if one does not desire the attention that a controversial point of view, large donation, or revelation of important information would bring. Anonymity gives security, freedom and a lack of responsibility. Complete anonymity is difficult, indeed almost impossible, to maintain in the real world - at least if we are to interact with our surroundings.

On the Internet, real anonymity can be a viable option for the free exchange of ideas.

When no one can tell who is speaking, it is difficult, if not impossible, to connect these words with any one person. Newcomers to this culture will often encounter a harsher tone and a macabre sense of humor that can be difficult to understand. This is what emerges in the absence of an ability to tie people to their actions and words. This anonymous image board culture has spread from Japan to the Western World. On certain image board websites, users are allowed the option of being identified only as "anonymous." And it is precisely on these sites the first timid steps in "Project Chanology", a campaign to dismantle the Scientology organization, were taken.

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

Does knowing something about the way technical architecture influences behavior mean that we can put that knowledge to use?

Can inhumane or dehumanizing effects of digital socializing be mitigated or eliminated by better media design?

in Coase's Penguin,[7] and then in The Wealth of Networks,[8] Benkler contributed to important theoretical foundations for a new way of thinking about online activity−"commons based peer production," technically made possible by a billion PCs and Internet connections−as a new form of organizing economic production, together with the market and the firm. If Benkler is right, the new story about how humans get things done includes an important corollary−if tools like the PC and the Internet make it easy enough, people are willing to work together for non-market incentives to create software, encyclopedias and archives of public domain literature.

In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it "ambient awareness."

The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme

we need to look at both agency and structure and so we need to end the theoretical conflict in favor of identifying shared goals

we need to develop strategies for decreasing the role of ignorance and fear in public debates about new media

The participation gap refers to these other social, cultural, and educational concerns which block full participation.