Nymwars

As of today I will not be able to post to this blog thanks to the fact my gmail address, associated with both this account and other google websites, is linked to a suspended G+ account - suspended mind you due to Google's crap attitude to pseudonyms...

The Bay Area woman was named one of 192 Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum, which is best known for organizing the annual Davos forum.

The deadline for real-name registration on Chinas Twitter-like microblogging sites has come and gone and, to the relief of some, has been uneventful. Users who havent verified their identities can still post messages on their microblogs printable 4th grade assessment

In 1971, journalist Don Hoefler coined the name Silicon Valley. And just like every other 40-year-old Gen Xer, Silicon Valley is now having an identity crisis—about identity no less. The question: How should people name themselves online?

This brings MacKinnon to her book's central concern: the idea that, more and more, we live under a new breed of digital sovereigns — the Mark Zuckerbergs, Jeff Bezoses and Larry Pages — and thus is time to start to argue for our rights as citizens of cyberspace, not users or consumers or eyeballs being delivered to advertisers. Thus, for example, the recent pushback on Google after it insisted that users of Google Plus use their real names, which some called the "Nym wars," was, for MacKinnon, a hopeful example of netizens engaging with a kind of "collective bargaining," she noted during her talk at MIT. "We're at the Magna Carta moment" for this movement, she noted, insisting that revolution and constitution-drafting remained far off.

Several major websites spent the past year slowly chiseling away at online anonymity. Two of the biggest forces, Facebook and Google, even got into open spats, demanding that members use their real names online – and booting many who refused.