I desperately want everyone to take the time and consider this: that everyone you talk to, online and off, is a human with wants and needs. It then becomes a vicious cycle, when people turn to anonymity to escape the savagery of the internet and when people use anonymity to dish out said savagery on other people on the internet. Whether it’s berating someone for not knowing the difference between “your” and “you’re”, or just insulting someone for not sharing your worldview, the internet can be a cruel place. The Badīeing on the internet, I would find it unbelievable if you told me you’ve never encountered a troll.Īnonymity gives people a sense of freedom - the kind of freedom that lets people think they can do whatever they want and get away with it without consequence. Sharing their frustrations with someone gave them reprieve, if only for that moment. All I could do was listen and offer words of support.
I posted a Whisper offering a listening ear and received all manner of responses, including a man who had been dumped via text by his girlfriend of 6 years on New Year’s Eve, and a girl who was relentlessly bullied by her classmates for being fat and turned to anorexia. You might even compare it to a confessional in a Catholic Church. There is a mysterious connection when you trust a stranger with your deepest secrets that offers no judgment and no repercussions. Who would the stranger tell your secrets to? They don’t know you, least of all any of your friends or relatives. There is a certain comfort to confiding in a stranger. What this means is that you could post a whisper, change your username immediately after and then post another whisper, and everyone would have no clue they’re from the same person.Īnonymity is a force to be reckoned with, and it brings out the best and the worst in people. Whisper prides itself so much on its anonymity that it assigns you a randomly-generated username when you first join, and you can change that username to anything you want at any time. Think NUS Confessions, but a little more crude and sinister, and you might have an idea of what Whisper is like.
For those who don’t know, Whisper is an app that lets you “share your real thoughts and feelings, without identities”. I spent the past month or so hovering around Whisper after installing it for the first time. What if people find out what videos I’ve been watching? What if they laugh at me? Using Whisper In fact, anonymity was something I had grown so accustomed to that I was incredibly wary when places like Google and Youtube started asking for my real name. We value our privacy after all, that’s why we do it. In this modern age we live in, everyone wears a mask.
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