Silencing the Clatter by Removing Anonymity in a Corporate Online Community

Gilly Leshed
Information Science Cornell University

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     Last modified: May 17, 2005

Abstract
As we experiment with various forms of online discussion and assess their impact on community and community formation, one of the crucial questions is how anonymity impacts the discussion. Comparing online discussions that allow or prohibit anonymity is a helpful start, but a more compelling inquiry is to examine how a single discussion group changed when anonymity was introduced or removed. We examined an intra-corporate online community with discussion threads focused on personal topics such as traveling, recipes, work dynamics, and more general topics. In October 2003, following a series of offensive expressions, the management turned participation in the discussion groups from anonymous to identifiable, except in one group, titled Just Talking. Several methods were used to analyze the effects of the anonymity removal: calculating posting and visiting frequencies before and after the change; analyzing threads’ discourses, and; open-ended questionnaires to community participants and key informants. The findings indicated that posting frequency dropped after the change in all but the Just Talking discussion groups, and that conversations turned into well-focused exchanges related to the thread topic. Interestingly, while discourses in the Just Talking thread reveal that many participants were disappointed with the change, the questionnaires suggest that some workers supported it. Also, though the management did not intend to turn discussions off but only to turn discussions off but only to force responsible and decent expression, participants deciphered the act as a means to remove any democratic attributes and restrain access to the community. The study shows that removing anonymity had a crucial impact on shaping participation and online conversations in the community, as well as on the attitudes of participants toward the workplace.