Anonymous online comments are attracting attention from newspaper and website publishers, academics, and others who care about how we talk to each other. (More)

The National Conference of Editorial Writers recently discussed whether to end anonymous online comments at newspaper sites. The president of NCEW, Froma Harrop, wrote about the issue this week at Nation of Change:

More speech is not necessarily a positive development. News sites’ online forums have unleashed speech in quantity, for sure. But they’ve given a stage to swarms of moronic insults and outright lies, most cloaked in anonymity or false identities. Such comments waste our time – but of larger concern, they degrade the civic culture and undermine thoughtful attempts to craft public policy.

Last November, New York Times op-ed contributor Julie Zhuo detailed some heart-wrenching examples:

After Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old Long Island girl, committed suicide earlier this year, trolls descended on her online tribute page to post pictures of nooses, references to hangings and other hateful comments. A better-known example involves Nicole Catsouras, an 18-year-old who died in a car crash in California in 2006. Photographs of her badly disfigured body were posted on the Internet, where anonymous trolls set up fake tribute pages and in some cases e-mailed the photos to her parents with subject lines like “Hey, Daddy, I’m still alive.”

Psychological research has proven again and again that anonymity increases unethical behavior. Road rage bubbles up in the relative anonymity of one’s car. And in the online world, which can offer total anonymity, the effect is even more pronounced. People — even ordinary, good people — often change their behavior in radical ways. There’s even a term for it: the online disinhibition effect.

Salon‘s Matt Zoller Seitz thinks even the worst of that is socially worthwhile:

It’s impossible for anyone who reads unmoderated comments threads on large websites to argue that racism, sexism or anti-Semitism are no longer problems in America, or that the educational system is not as bad as people say or that deep down most people are good at heart. Unmoderated comments threads are X-rays of the reptilian brain — indicators of the dark stuff that rattles around in the id and that would get blurted out in the home or workplace routinely if the superego didn’t intervene. Mel Gibson’s rants are no more ugly than sentiments that get expressed thousands of times a day all over the Internet.

When a person comments anonymously, we’re told, they’re putting a mask on. But the more time I spend online the more I’m convinced that this analogy gets it backward.

The self that we show in anonymous comments, the fantasy self, the self we see in the mirror when we fantasize about being tough and strong and feared, the face we would present to the world if there were no such thing as consequences: That’s the real us.

The civil self is the mask.

The psychologists who researched Online disinhibition effect – the tendency of some to self-disclose or act out online in ways they would not in a face-to-face conversation – disagree:

Rather than thinking of disinhibition as the revealing of an underlying “true self,” we can conceptualize it as a shift to a constellation within self-structure, involving clusters of affect and cognition that differ from the in-person constellation.

Translated from academese, they suggest our “true self” consists of many possible selves, depending on social context.

The most savage online commenters are, as even Seitz concedes, engaging in a fantasy of “being tough and strong and feared, the face we would present to the world if there were no such thing as consequences.” There are consequences in face-to-face interactions, so that is not, as Seitz concludes “the real us.” It is a possible self … a fantasy.

Talking Points Memo is among many sites that debated whether to require commenters to use their real names. Yet as online culture consultant Anil Dash argued, humans have for millenia found solutions to curb our worst behavioral impulses. Simply, we establish norms and find ways to discipline those who violate the norms.

We have done that here at BPI. Our Admissions Department has guidelines for reader comments, and our About BPI page details our editorial policy for authors. Our editors not only fix typos and other helpful nips’n'tucks. We also delete expletives and even entire comments when necessary. Simply, we expect each other to behave as responsible adults, but with the caveat that children may be reading. We manage to accomplish that without requiring our faculty, staff, and student body to use their real names.

As MKSinSA discussed last month, putting your real name online allows anyone to find out almost everything about you. There are many, entirely valid reasons to avoid that, and pseudonymity gives us at least a small shield. Research shows that pseudonymity also helps reduce patterns of privilege that are common in conversation.

A review of Facebook-based comment sites – or a few hours listening to talk radio – should be enough to challenge the notion that using real names would take us back to an imagined Good Old Days where people treated each other with respect and courtesy. Where that exists, it exists because people create and enforce rules.

That’s not “censorship” or “political correctness” It’s “community.”