"I've been cruising around myspace."
What does anonymity allow for in these virtual networking sites? The act of looking someone up and down, or cruising the strip checking people out, looking for potentials of some sort is regarded completely differently over the Internet.
Boyd would say the relative anonymity is for privacy, but it's important to also look at what is lost as well as what might be gained. While cruiging briefly through MySpace, I was really shocked by what teens, and others, would post in their profiles. Is it really because they feel safe somehow, or is just because they're naive and don't realize that strangers in cars with puppies also have accesss to the internet, or - perhaps, they simply don't care? There's definitely an aspect of exhibitionism involved, but who is the exhibition for?