Anonymity

One of the most famous cartoons of the early internet was this 1993 cartoon by Peter Steiner, in which a dog tells another dog, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

There's deep truth here. As you surf the web, browsing sites and forums, you are only who you say you are. Same goes for everyone else; "Catherine15" may easily be a forty-year-old man.

This has advantages. You can be a little more frank and assertive than usual, without worrying about someone coming after you with a pickaxe. There's less fear, and fewer consequences.

The disadvantages are exactly that—less fear, and fewer consequences. Everyone else can be rude, and nothing will stop them except an administrator deleting their posts or account.

The Web is Blind and Deaf

Not only are you anonymous, so is everyone else. This means that you don't know who you're talking to. You may read an article on abortion, written by someone who's had one. Or you could make a comment about the Holocaust to a Holocaust survivor (or the child of one).

Alternatively, someone could be acting sensitive about an issue that they have no experience with.

The other side of this issue is that internet articles can be written by just about anyone. Of course, some websites are very careful about what they publish, but any random webpage you stumble upon could be written by a man who's completely off his rocker.

There's No "There" There

Every site on the web consists of data on hard disk drives. (Well, it's a little more complex than that, but that's the basic truth.) That means that, if anything happens to any of those disk drives, the data is gone. And so are the sites.

There may be backups...or there may not. Websites can disappear overnight. Whole communities can vanish.

Worse than that, anything can change at any time. I can go back and revise any blog post I've ever written, and from this point on it will be changed. How can anyone know what I've written in the past?

Things Move Fast Here

Everyone knows it, but it bears repeating. The web moves fast. Sites come and go. Communities grow and die. A site that existed a month ago may be gone now, or completely different.