Internet Anonymity is OK!

5 min readNov 22, 2017

What if we could represent how people feel when they send a message? What if we could measure the emotions, associated with the sender of a message, and include it with the message? Would that give us a better understanding of what people “mean” by their messages?

Claude Shannon represented a message as “bits” per second. According to Shannon’s Law the highest obtainable error-free data speed, expressed in bits per second (bps), is a function of the channel bandwidth (b) and the signal-to-noise ratio

c = b log2 (1 + s)

where:

c is the maximum obtainable error-free data speed in bps that a communications channel can handle.
b is the channel bandwidth in hertz and
s represents the signal-to-noise ratio.

However, as Shannon himself noted, “the “fundamental problem of communication, still exists”. It is “that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning.” — Claude Shannon (1948)

Essentially Aldous Huxley agreed with Shannon, especially as related to communication among human beings:

“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”

With our current information systems messages are essentially “meaningless”, except as interpreted by the receiver but what about the meaning the sender intended? Today messages are simply the transmission of data that represents symbols used by conventional communication techniques (i.e. writing, mathematics, pictures, etc). Unless a sender is an expert expressing emotions with those conventional techniques, meaning is absent from the transmission and the message is largely sterile.

Emotions are as much physical as they are mental, and it appears that people from a wide range of cultures feel their emotions in the same places on their bodies. This heat map shows where those places are — from the blush of shame, to that warm lower-belly feeling in love.

More than 700 participants in Finland, Sweden and Taiwan participated in experiments aimed at mapping their bodily sensations in connection with specific emotions. Participants viewed emotion-laden words, videos, facial expressions and stories. They then self-reported areas of their bodies that felt different than before they viewed the material. By coloring in two computer-generated silhouettes — one to note areas of increased bodily sensation and the second to mark areas of decreased sensation — participants were able to provide researchers with a broad base of data showing both positive and negative bodily responses to different emotions.

The following graphic shows mean levels of experience (ranging from 1 to 5) of basic emotions while reading the stories used in experiment. Target emotions for each story are represented in the following graphic. On the perimeter, different lines show experience of each emotion:

AN, anger;
FE, fear
DI, disgust
HA, happiness
SA, sadness;
SU, surprise
NE, neutral

An emotion is comprised of a flow of visceral sensations and changes in the body. Emotions are adjustments by organisms to their environment and signal whether it’s functioning is below neutral, neutral or optimal. Emotions carry meaningful messages on how individuals are getting along. When emotions are experienced in combinations and over time, feelings result. For example, “I’m angry with you this minute, but I feel contempt for you lately. Feelings are how our minds interpret and perceive these feedbacks.

Dr. Antonio Damasio’s model, which follows, is a useful way to think about experiences. Human beings can experience the same “somatosensory” information and emotions, but then interpret and experience them as different feelings, depending on the multitude of differences that exist among individuals.

Feelings support yet another level of homeostatic regulation. Feelings are a mental expression of all other levels of homeostatic regulation.” according to Dr Damasio.

Scientists can now identify emotions based on brain activity and a computer model can correctly represent the emotion of the actors when they were shown a series of evocative photos. Each emotion essentially had a neural signature.

The patterns of brain activity the computer learned were not limited to test participants. Based on the scans of an actor’s brains, like the adjacent one, a computer model can correctly identify the emotions of a subjects who had not participated in the earlier trials. This new study begins to lay a baseline for how to objectively “measure” emotions and once measured, digitize them for transmission along Shannon’s channel. That means there’s a basis for representing a sender’s emotions and feelings in such a way they can be transmitted over a channel to a receiver.

“Emotions play out in the theater of the body.

Feelings play out in the theater of the mind“ — Dr.Sarah Mckay

Then again maybe if we provide too much meaning with our messages we’ll undermine the benefits of “Internet Anonymity”. ”Human beings are notoriously clever, some would say kind, when it comes to disguising emotions when they “feel” the need. After all what husband has the nerve to tell his wife the Thanksgiving dinner, she took hours preparing, wasn’t anything but the best meal he’s ever eaten?

The “anonymity of the Internet” made famous by the New Yorker “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon is a reminder of just how clever we can be, when it comes to hiding our true feelings most likely for very good and kind reasons.

The whole concept of “Internet anonymity” began with the cartoon caption by Peter Steiner and published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993. It says a lot for the often human need for anonymity and polite conversation given the fact that by 2011, the cartoon was the most reproduced cartoon from The New Yorker.

Notes:

Internet Anonymity is OK!

Written by william smith