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Visual anonymity exists in an online community if individuals communicate with each other without their physical appearances attached to their messages.

A second level of anonymity is the dissociation of real and online identities. In online communities, there is ample anecdotal evidence that many individuals create a new persona for themselves using nicknames and avatars

A third level of anonymity is the concept of lack of identifiability, in which an individual’s behaviors are not distinguishable from others’ behaviors

The crux of Carpenter’s insight, I think, is that he isn’t just interested in a privileging of sight over other senses, but a particular way of thinking of sight as touch, of imagining that the things we see are real. On a certain level, of course, we do know that if we look at a row of trees, the “trees” are real while the “row” is imaginary, but — at the same time — Carpenter is not wrong to note that we do tend to act as if these mental bridges are real. Jonathan Edwards’ notion that what God “sees” produces reality gets secularized into practices we do without thinking about it: seeing is believing, we say, and despite all the evidence that seeing a thing is practically synonymous with seeing it wrong, we can still use phrases like “photographic evidence” as if it’s not an oxymoron.

The Cairo News Company, which provided satellite services and equipment for Al Jazeera, the BBC and CNN, was raided by police after it transmitted footage of the food riots.

But new media applications were changing the rules. This was demonstrated by the arrest of a journalism student from Berkeley named James Karl Buck, who was detained along with his Egyptian interpreter as he photographed a street protest. Buck used the Twitter application on his cell phone to send a snapshot of himself and the text message “arrested” to a list serve of his contacts. His friends used the message to prompt intervention from Berkeley and the U.S. consulate. Buck was soon able to Twitter the word “free,” and mounted an online campaign to release his interpreter.

police finally located him and tortured him for his Facebook password and names of the other group members (the vast majority of which he didn’t know).