With PRISM being in the news and Facebook even having dossiers on people who aren’t a member, everybody has an opinion on privacy. And with the birthday of Orwell in our mind, this isn’t a bad thing. Online we have been forced in being ourselves (e.g. Facebook, Amazon,…), but still we look for places were we still can think we are anonymous.

Take for example Whisper, a site I found through a piece Tomio Geron wrote on Forbes. This app and social network is build on sharing thoughts (and secrets) anonymously:

And while we often think about anonymous replies as something that can be dangerous, e.g. cyberbullying, Whisper also talks about the advantages for mental health with their Your Voice-project.

But you can take this even step further with Duvamis.com. They describes themselves as:

…your opportunity to communicate freely, without fear of being judged by others. Through guaranteed anonymity, Duvamis is a platform that allows you to express yourself, break the chains of your socially accepted image and discover what truly makes you happy.

If you watch their (quite haunting) video they explain that we all are influenced by others, hindering to be ourselves. The irony is that the whole Duvamis-project is still all about other people reacting on what you do. But, because you and the others are anonymous, the idea is that you can be much more open and honest.

This is a way of thinking about authenticity that relates closely to what e.g. Rousseau described.Culture hampers us in being ourselves. But… this is a very specific way of looking at ‘self’ and ‘authenticity’. You could also think that you are yourself because of the interactions with others. Because of your life experiences. This is something I’m more in line with. If you don’t have any holiday-literature chosen yet, maybe ‘The Authenticity Hoax’ by Andrew Potter can be something worth reading on this topic.