The spotlight turns on you. Your breath stops. Every imperfection becomes conscious for the world to see in high definition. You are in every way the center of attention. Every breath taken thereafter is a sharp record of your brief existence. Better not mess up whatever you are about to say or do while you’re in the moment.

Anonymity is a strange thing. It can be both comforting and frightening. Anonymity absolves identity and frees from accountability. It releases one from the entrapments of judgment that tenaciously grip the threads of thriving social networks. Anonymity gives permission to breathe and sigh without a trace. There is a liberating feeling that accompanies the thought of acting without personal consequence. Anonymity is a path to relieve the pressure built throughout the day. A way to probe the depths of your existence without giving away your position in the world, anonymity gives those who succumb to it the power to shed the weighted burden of “political correctness” that an identity imposed by society forces upon those who carry it.

We used to be able to go to another city and recreate ourselves, start from scratch. Being a new face in town without a reputation gave us a level playing field from which to start over with a new our identity in any way we’d like. Starting over, getting a second chance, claiming innocence, growing sideways, being a complete enigma, are all things we gave up the first moment we chose to login to a social network.

The edges that connect users on current social networks have given rise to a topological web that is hyper-responsive and which has negligible attenuation. A non-anonymous social network effectively binds us to our identities, irrespective of our location.  A blunder on social media is not forgotten in the next city you visit. You instantly become known to anyone who connects to the internet. If you made a politically insensitive post in your youth, someone in Ukraine whom you’ve never met could know about that nasty wall post your ex-boss made the next day (even after you deleted the post). The feeling that you are being watched is now a real threat to everyone online. Anything you do online is kept permanent and unchanged forever. There is no yellowing of websites, no permanent dating of data. That comment to your high school rival on Facebook is as living today as your tweet at work yesterday about sexual harassment in the workplace. Data will now persist everywhere and for eternity, with your name attached to it all for the world to see for years to come.

Personally, anonymous blogging has allowed me to share my deepest thoughts and emotions with the world. It has given me the chance to communicate to the Internet of Things without being tethered to it. It is a way to talk rhetorically and unidentifiably so that those who listen can hear only thoughts and ideas that are free from the contaminants of a profile and a social/work history.

---

Lamentation over anonymity should be taken with a healthy dose of perspective. Anonymity’s benefits are often abstracted from its actual implementation. If exposed through anonymity, one’s deepest beliefs and thoughts can be entirely massacred without resistance due to the frictionless environment built by anonymity (4Chan, Reddit, Yik Yak, etc.). The filth of mankind can easily be fueled by anonymity, introducing a degree of chaos into a social network. Yik Yak had created a place where individual expression is homogenized into groupthink behavior. The blending between a sense of self and group think has handicapped a generation into emulating mindless behavior that seeks to satisfy personal vanity pervading such social networks, hence the Yakarma  score was born.

Tech has mainstreamed many aspects of human life. Unfortunately in the process of creating social spaces with tech, a degradation of natural social coutumes has resulted. The rampant feelings of isolation and depression in today’s online population points all fingers to tech. While online social networks claim to connect users organically and with little effort, most currently offer an artificial solution that requires extraordinary effort to form genuine connections with people. This is because today a social network can only grow with the mainstream if stakeholders see a potential for outrageous profit. At the moment that a social network is seen as a product through which users become auctionable to the highest bidder, it is stripped of its claims to an authentic identity. The social network loses the purpose and drive that fostered its growth in the first place and becomes a facade in front of an engine of profit.

I believe that amidst a turbulent sea of social media applications, a significant portion of people online still crave “another” social network. One that does not measure its success by the growth of its userbase, one that is not upholstered with investors drooling over the day ad revenues will explode, but one that listens to people and delivers what they really want.

---

I am going to take a risk in guessing what people want (from a social app): a social network that will minimize the time spent on your mobile device and maximize quality time spent with old and new faces. If an app was able to wield tech to condense small talk and ice-breaking into a highly consumable and enriched form, with quality content that was credible, it would give people the ability to  genuinely connect with others instantly. Of course, the design of such an app would have to carefully respect the truths of how people actually interact in real life. But I believe that the app would be a success. A success that would be measured in the number of lives touched, not in the number of hits or number of downloads, but in the individual connections and stories that would be made possible because of such a simple tool on users’ smartphones.

The market for social networking apps is saturated. I will not deny this fact. But the quality of life that these apps are currently advertising for its users is an opportunity to learn from them all. People deserve a new class of social networking that focuses on getting people to meet up (not just for hook-ups like Tinder). People fall in love with things that aren’t good for them, but it would be powerful to see people fall in love with things that are good for them for a change.