I was born in 1988 into a middle class family. I recall my father owning an early personal computer (if I recall correctly, a Timex Sinclair), and we obtained a used Commodore 64 when I was very young. It was used almost exclusively for the incredible electronic games that came with it, but it was a computer nonetheless. My first taste for an updated, more modern visual OS came with a Packard Bell running Windows 3.1, which we must have gotten around 1993. A few years later we got AOL, which was basically the definition of the world wide web at the time, and the rest is history.

I consider myself among the earliest cohort of the digital natives. Sure, for a decade before me there were people on computers, and in the decade that followed there were more children born directly into this new technological age, but I didn’t need to come out clutching an iPad to be comfortable around technology.

The term for those that came before this time is digital immigrant. These are the people who are not natively fluent in computer technology, and are often seen as disadvantaged in this regard. Indeed, one of the issues that is most pressing now (though fading) is the instruction by these digital immigrants of natives, who often pick up new technology quicker and in a more in-depth fashion than their teachers. Social media and collaboration, for instance is a tool more heavily used by younger generations, with immense power for educational transformation, yet the usage isn’t always clear to those that do not participate.

The terms themselves are a bit controversial, in that they attempt a dichotomy between the “haves” and “have nots” of information fluency in the digital age. This is a much more complex issue than age alone, but as a shorthand rule, can serve as conventional wisdom. More important is understanding that a divide exists between a portion of the population that routinely uses digital technology to communicate, and those that do not.

Professor Yochai Benkler has described collaborative projects and open-source economics as a form of “commons-based peer production”. Peer production, in his terms, is an opportunity to practice virtuous behavior. The internet has enabled virtuous behavior to affect large scale projects, in turn spreading the virtues of the system and producing output that could not be done in smaller scale or more centralized projects.

The most important principles for peer production are modularity, granularity, and low cost of integration. Modules are individual pieces of a project that can be done asynchronously across multiple places and disciplines, and merge the efforts of several individuals of the commons. Granularity refers to how well those modules can be broken down, allowing people of different levels of integration, motivation and skill to contribute. Low-cost integration refers to the ease with which a module can be added to the project as a whole, making the need for hierarchical oversight as low as possible.

The most obvious examples of these projects are open-source software projects, many of which can have tens or hundreds of thousands of collaborators. Linux and Unix, the base for most operating systems in use today come from this type of collaboration. The basis of the internet itself and many major improvements are based on peer production as well, such as the most popular web server, Apache. I’m of course a huge proponent of WordPress, one of the most public and successful of these projects, powering close to a quarter of the most popular websites on the internet.

Code projects aren’t the only things affected by this virtuous behavior. Knowledgebases such as Wikipedia and Quora couldn’t exist or function without people who devote their own time freely to the increase of public knowledge. While they are for-profit corporations, Slashdot and Reddit are also community based projects, sharing news based on the interests of their users. Any social network follows from this network effect as well: The larger the network (virtuous cycle) gets, the more useful it becomes.

There are countless places that you can find claims of a study which found that only 7% of communication is verbal. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that since the veracity of that claim cannot be determined, and that it’s difficult to prove that one rule would govern all communication like that, I’m going to go with the more commonly accepted wisdom that while body language and nonverbal communication are important, they are not the end all in conversation.

Most forms of digital communication offer no real recourse to determine intention via body language. Sure, we have asterisk action, but this forces a third person mode upon your conversation, making the character that you speak through a separate entity from yourself. Emojis are another method that attempts to bridge the gap, but even the wide range of icons at our disposal are abysmal in conveying tone accurately.

There are positives to this lack of certain nonverbal cues. If you are communicating with someone from another culture, the lack of vocal and physical cues could be a boon, allowing a flow of information unimpeded by the distraction that body language can cause. As has been demonstrated in a variety of studies (and through misunderstandings resulting from a lack of awareness), not all people speak the same “silent languages”. Most nonverbal cues come through acculturation, not a more standardized training like the written word.

Similar to the idea of anonymity, the removal of body language from interaction can allow for a more unbiased communication. No one need know that you’re a woman instead of a man in a professional correspondence, such as when Linda Sandvik changed to a gender-neutral username at Github, which has it’s share of sexism issues. In this case the anonymity of sorts can provide a sort of cloak of normality, allowing a freer discourse not based on external cues.

As Clive Thompson recounts for CBC, anonymous users of social media and message boards are just as likely to post negative content as logged in users, whether they use a pseudonym or not. This thought goes against the popular wisdom of anonymous commenters feeling freer to use negative emotions in discussion, yet makes sense in cases where having a name attached to a comment inhibits freedom of expression.

What anonymity does allow is more openness. The tagline for one of the more popular anonymous messaging apps right now, Secret, is “Share with your friends, secretly. Speak freely.” The implication there is that the mental filters that we place on ourselves in public discourse, where our identity is known to all participants, are themselves inhibited when we allow the ability to distance ourselves from statements equally with those around us. Secret still revolves around social circles that you have created, but gives a sense of plausible deniability to attributing any statements to an original author.

Contrast this with Whisper, another popular anonymous messaging service. Instead of working in a limited social group, messages there are displayed to all users of the service. The messages are placed on “cards”, which are photo backgrounds with text overlaid, reminiscent of the PostSecret movement (which at one time had it’s own app, albeit with an entirely different function). In this case the messages are more impersonal, as they are not intended for a specific group of individuals to read them. When the specificity of directed postings, such as comment boards or directed replies is removed, the pleasure that comes from targeted barbs is removed as well. Why lash out when no one will be hurt?

There is a reason that anonymous communication tools are rapidly proliferating, while a move such as YouTube comments being tied to Google Plus profiles is met with ridicule and outright hate. Ultimately, the role of anonymity in digital communication has less to do with the ability to hurt than the ability to become open. Anonymity allows communication to occur that otherwise would not without the need to connect to offline identities.