#but the need for a work to be commercially successful is often antithetical to creating good and authentic art!

[metanarrates]

Ah man i was thinking about the genshin ask you got the other day because it reminded me of my experience playing it for maybe a year? Definitely less + only played regularly for a portion of that duration + never managed to catch up with the main story. Long ask coming up ahead 😭

Anyway this is related because while i haven't played a hoyoverse game since then, i have been somewhat familiar with the lore surrounding their little multiverse and it is insane the disparity in quality between the Honkai titles and Genshin. Better writing, better game design, better art, the whole shebang (i believe honkai impact is centered around the story of a bunch of of tragic subtextual lesbians who in attempting to defy fate beome gods of destruction or whatever. Yippee). Interestingly, or perhaps not so interestingly depending on who you talk to, ive found that genshin's developmemt has an extreme emphasis on commercialism where the Honkai games do not. And of course with that commercial emphasis you end up with what's essentially a glorified vehicle for escapism, as you have to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible and that means advertising to concepts they find palatable and comforting. But even within the genre, hoyoverse is a unique outlier for the narrative precedent of escapism that it sets. There is an overarching theme concerning the nature of destiny and defiance of it, and this clashes with the end of the writing necessarily needing to refuse to challenge audience expectations. If you want to tell a story of how a lone hero transcends the clause of narrative inevitability as a stand-in for self discovery or triumph over inequitabilities, then you sort of. Have to??? Make complex multidimensional characters with their own agency and fleshed out internal conflict. However, the story then must serve itself, prioritize itself, over the quandary of status quo. This clashing of creative goals and economic means results in a product that at its core feels incredibly confused, like it cant decide what it wants to be. Honkai titles, by contrast, arent intended to be a mild fantasy for the player to lose themselves in. It's still ultimately just a chess piece in the corporate game Hoyo is playing, but at the very least, it chooses a direction and sticks with it, framing marketing decisions around an established narrative appeal. Something to chew on, i suppose. Definitely fuel to consider the relationship between capitalism and fiction

that's so interesting! I always find it fascinating when the need for wide audience appeal clashes with the seeming goal of a story. I'm interested in the conditions around the development of a work in general (ive read a LOT of stuff about rgu's development, for example) but in works like this I'm always very curious about what happened in those game studios. was it a case where the writers wanted to do something but the studio shot it down? or was it literally the writers having to deal with those conflicting needs without consciously acknowledging it and created a work that shoots itself in the foot? doesn't matter either way, I guess, but I would like to know.

[miguelmarias]

Forever falling: Vertigo

For some, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) has always been one of those ‘bedside’ films (as François Truffaut put it, before such a thing could be taken literally) – which means that we store it so well in our minds, and in our hearts, that we can think about it and ‘watch’ it again whenever the mood takes us. We do this to delve a little bit deeper into the film’s inexhaustible and fascinating enigmas, to relive our first impressions and to compare Hitchcock’s film to the rest of filmmaking – if only to reassure ourselves of its status as an unsurpassed peak, making films that hold more prestige for critics and historians seem lesser works by comparison. And yet the truth is that its status as a great work has only been admitted comparatively recently.

None of Hitchcock’s films, for instance, featured in Sight & Sound’s first top ten in 1952, and Vertigo didn’t feature in the 1962 critics’ poll, compiled four years after the film’s release. In fact Vertigo didn’t appear in the poll until 1982, when it came seventh. By 1992 it was up to fourth (and sixth in the newly instigated directors’ poll); then in 2002 it came second (remaining sixth for the directors).

Why did it take so long? Unlike, say, Bicycle Thieves, which was more or less instantly acclaimed as a masterpiece (coming top in the 1952 poll, only four years after its release), films such as Vertigo and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) initially met with a mixed reception from critics – and with indifference from the public. Which means that, beyond the mere passing of time and the perseverance of their defenders, these works must have something very special about them to have been able to finally impose themselves as great works.

But why, in the case of Vertigo, do we come back again and again, even though the art of cinema and the film’s original audience have changed? The generation that first revered the film has got older and gained experience, but we have also lost illusions and enthusiasm. Why, after watching Vertigo more than, say, 30 times, are we confident that there are things to discover in it – that some aspects remain ambiguous and uncertain, unfathomably complex, even if we scrutinise every look, every cut, every movement of the camera? Why do we never get tired of Hitchcock telling us the story of Scottie Ferguson’s obsession with three people in one – Madeleine Elster, Carlotta Valdes and Judy Barton – even though we know it by heart?

Narrative discoveries

It is generally accepted that Hitchcock was one of the great film narrators. He has long been considered a skilful artisan at the service of his audience, willing to flatter us, and eager to make the biggest profit with his products – a direct concern for him, because he participated in the financing of his films, which meant that his future creative freedom depended on good commercial results. Hitchcock always wanted to keep his hands free so he could make something greater than he’d made before.

The tendency among earlier critics was to try to reduce him to the role of ‘master of suspense’, perhaps because his success sparked off a multitude of inferior imitators. Hitchcock’s narrative discoveries, the structural audacity with which he surprised us – the death of the love interest 70 minutes into Vertigo, or of protagonist Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) 40 minutes into Psycho – all those innovations were considered mistakes by critics then. These were possibilities no other producer would have tolerated; even with Hitchcock’s creative autonomy, few would have dared to attempt them.

Of course Hitchcock understood the importance of dramatic narrative and character conventions. He knew how to play with them and pretend he was complying with them – as when retired policeman Scottie (James Stewart) initiates his investigation of Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) at the behest of her husband Gavin (Tom Helmore) – so that the spectator, trusting in orthodoxy, would anticipate the position where the director wanted them to be, allowing him to create and dilate that mixture of tension and uncertainty that is ‘suspense’.

Come the time, he also knew how to brutally undermine those conventional expectations (making us realise, for instance, that Scottie has been suckered into the Elster case because of his fatal flaw, the vertigo he has experienced ever since he was left dangling from the edge of a roof during a chase in the film’s opening sequence), leaving the spectator disoriented – and therefore ready to be taken wherever he wanted us to go.

Hitchcock knew that an excess of confusion can distance, that too many explanations can tire and make us lose the thread, that a prolonged vagueness can jeopardise the credibility of a story. Yet he also knew that if one wants to put aside (or forget for a while) the plausible and go deep into the terrain of the extraordinary and the improbable, ambiguity is necessary to preserve a fragile realism – in misè en scene, wardrobe, behaviour. Hitchcock was never spineless in this regard: when he was certain, he would jump in and violate any rule.

This allowed him to dive into the depths of the invisible, the ungraspable, the imperceptible, the unsafe, the weightless, the strange, the impossible (that which worryingly can happen). And this would provide him with the most adequate and efficient tools to lure us into that “momentary suspension of disbelief” of which Coleridge spoke, and elongate it in order for us to immerse ourselves in the inextricable depths of the human being. I won’t use the word ‘soul’, even though I’m sure Hitchcock believed in the existence of something like this.

There is no need to be a Christian to succumb to Hitchcock, just – ever so slightly – Freudian or Jungian. I suspect that Hitchcock, regardless of how sceptically or ironically he considered the jargon of psychoanalysis and its therapeutic virtues, didn’t ignore the theories and the institutions of the different psychoanalytic schools. Subjects that preoccupied and intrigued Sigmund Freud and his followers – such as sexuality and repression, dreams and the Oedipus complex, fear and the ‘lapsus’, lies and masks, sublimation and mythology, jokes, the subconscious and feelings of guilt, the illusion of grandeur and the persecution complex, paternal or authoritarian figures and possessive mothers, the family structure and hereditary features, child fixations and hysteria, hypnotism and schizophrenia, the uncanny and many others – seem like a repertoire of themes that recur in Hitchcock’s filmography.

That said, Catholicism provided Hitchcock with certain variations (or aggravating circumstances) on some of these themes: the notion of sin; the fear of knowledge and of woman as dangerous temptress; the expulsion from Paradise and the shame of the body; the mythologising of virginity and maternity; plagues and the way to the cross; mourning and the cult of the dead; faith in the afterlife and in the resurrection of the flesh; the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins as opportunities for transgression and guilt; miracle healing; eternal punishment; the consecration of ‘the wrong man’ in the figure of Christ; confession and its inviolable confidentiality; the inquisition and torture; the devil as seductive and astute being, proudly defiant of the divine supremacy; the conflict between predestination and freedom; the Apocalypse and the Last Judgement…

It would be as ridiculous to deny the importance of Judaeo-Christian obsessions in Hitchcock as it would be to reduce everything to a succession of Catholic dogmas and rituals. These obsessions are the perfect complement, conflictual and partly antithetical – and therefore dialectical, to his psychoanalytic sources of inspiration.

Another even less explored cultural source for Hitchcock – which strengthens the Catholic (which came from his education by the Jesuits) and the Freudian (which he encountered during his film apprenticeship in Weimar-era Germany) – is surrealism. This may be obvious, but in order to highlight it we need to look at the composition and framing, the texture and the combination of his images – above all in the silent part of his British period, chronologically the closest to those encounters.

Like the surrealists, Hitchcock thought that the interior (what happens ‘inside’) and the imaginary (dreamed, remembered or hallucinated) are as real as the external and tangible to which ‘reality’ is normally restricted. The influence here is not primarily literary but rather pictorial, and can be sensed in paintings by Richard Oelze, Max Ernst, Emil Nolde, Dorothea Tanning, Hans Bellmer, and in some of their predecessors, such as Friedrich, Böcklin, Munch and Fuseli.

Lastly, there remains a vision of the world to which this last clue drives us: romanticism. From many spheres – musical, literary, pictorial – and from various places – British, German, Italian, American, Russian – the footprints of romanticism can be detected in Hitchcock’s films. One feels the spectres of Poe, Stevenson, Hawthorne, Melville, George Du Maurier, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Georg Trakl, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Achim von Arnim and Gérard de Nerval.

In the same way, one can hear – under the curiously related melodies composed for his films by such different musicians as Franz Waxman, Hugo Friedhofer, Roy Webb, Maurice Jarre, Miklós Rózsa, Dimitri Tiomkin and above all Bernard Herrmann – measures and harmonies by Wagner, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Richard Strauss, Fauré, Franck, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Britten, early Stravinsky, the Schoenberg of ‘Verklärte Nacht’ (‘Transfigured Night’) – all of them centred in the recreation and transmission of emotions.

For me romanticism – often concealed under a layer of cynicism and humour, as in Lubitsch, Sternberg, Wilder, Ophuls, Stroheim or Mankiewicz – is the key to Hitchcock’s unequalled capacity to unsettle and move the spectator with a degree of implication and intensity that goes beyond a supposed ‘identification’ with the protagonist – an identification that Hitchcock tended to rupture violently and traumatically, and which in general was projected not on to a single (male) person, but on to the couple, at least.

Notorious (1946), for instance, is not the story of Devlin (Cary Grant) – even if its first part is told from his narrative (but not visual) point of view – nor is it that of Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), as the title may make us think; it is the story of that couple – or more so, of the triangle composed by Sebastian (Claude Rains), and the quadrilateral that would include his ominous mother (Leopoldine Konstantin).

More than the drama of the neurotic woman personified by Tippi Hedren, Marnie (1964) narrates her complex relationship with Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), and the no less ambiguous relationship with her mother. Vertigo, of course, is not just the story of Scottie, but also – even more so – of Judy in her different simulations or incarnations, manipulated, feigned, spontaneous or forced.

Seduction manoeuvres

Another reason why Vertigo turns out to be so intriguing, complex and suggestive stems from the fact that it gathers together a strange synthesis of various myths of Western culture, connected to the mystery of artistic creation, which is perhaps the film’s ultimate subject.

The most obvious myth is Pygmalion, combined with the Frankenstein variant of Prometheus; others would include Orpheus and Eurydice, although in a very sombre version, and almost inverted; the double or Döppelganger of the romantics and German expressionists, filtered through the schizoid sieve of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; the love in death and beyond this world of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ (and it is no coincidence that the ‘Liebestod’ of Wagner’s opera is the audible origin of Herrmann’s score, mainly of the ‘Love Theme’); some vampire tales and the novel Peter Ibbetson by George Du Maurier (not the pale and miscast film version by Henry Hathaway).

Some others could also be mentioned, such as Faust, but what’s interesting here is that it is not a case of showing off cultural references, but of a melancholic and tragic story of love (much more than a detective story), full of multiple resonances that are admirably integrated, and which converge in what Robin Wood, Jean Douchet and Eugenio Trías have considered a parable of creation, and of the mise en scène.

Let’s not forget that Vertigo is a succession of mises en scène and seduction manoeuvres. The first shows us how Gavin Elster, an old friend from student days, requests Scottie’s services as a detective in order to use him in an improbable criminal conspiracy. First he tempts him, like Mephistopheles, with a return to action, restoring Scottie’s lost confidence. Once this route fails, Elster intrigues him with the implausible story of Carlotta Valdes and the power it exerts over his wife Madeleine – a story told in encircling movements, going up and down the different ‘levels’ of his huge office, like the scriptwriter and director who first seduce the producer, then the actors and finally the audience. Elster banks on the fact that – in a third phase, admirably staged in Ernie’s restaurant – Scottie is going to be captivated by the ethereal, ghostly, hieratic and gliding beauty of Madeleine, which will finally convince him to believe such a fantastic tale and accept the mission of following and protecting her.

From the moment he positions himself inside his car at the door of Elster’s mansion and furtively follows Madeleine, Scottie thinks he is directing the second mise en scène. The mix of contemplation and distance and growing curiosity is intoxicating as Scottie, without realising it, starts falling in love with an imaginary person whom he dreams of saving, without ever suspecting that ‘Madeleine’ has been forced to interpret a role. He follows her, bewitched, through different places, each more or less funereal: a flower shop, which she enters through the back door; the cemetery of the Mission Dolores; the museum where she contemplates the portrait of the unfortunate Carlotta; the lonely room in the sinister and desolate McKittrick Hotel (a herald of the house in which Norman Bates coexists with the memory of his mother), in which Madeleine vanishes like a ghost, as if she were a hallucination of Scottie’s.

His unconscious desires start to become a reality when Madeleine throws herself into San Francisco Bay by the Golden Gate, giving him the opportunity to save her like some knight errant – and to feel, as in the Chinese tradition he cites, responsible for her; to take her to his flat, undress her, watch her sleeping and talk to her for the first time. In this phase, a relationship of affinity binds these prowling idlers. They visit different places on the outskirts of San Francisco, exchange confidences, fears and dreams. This phase is consummated – once Scottie is in love with Madeleine – with the unseen murder of Elster’s real wife, presented traumatically to Scottie (and the viewer) as a suicide that he couldn’t prevent.

The third mise en scène takes to the limit the condition of the powerless spectator, which we share with Scottie; it’s a painful repetition, under the effects of the loss or abandonment syndrome of the previous ‘movement’. Like an inconsolable widower, Scottie revisits the places where he first followed and spied on Madeleine from a distance, and those where they were together: the giant sequoias, the solitary coast beaten by the swell and the wind, the Mission San Juan Bautista.

The fourth mise en scène – after a few false alarms that leave us breathless, making our heart skip in rhythm with the wounded and depressed Scottie – starts when the ex-detective bumps into Judy Barton. A shop assistant, she seems carnal, even vulgar – very far from the formal elegance and distinction of Madeleine, who was so pale and whispering, so shy and fragile, so ethereal and disturbed; but in Judy he discovers an echo of the loved and lost image. Now Scottie becomes scriptwriter and producer, director and wardrobe designer, make-up artist and decorator, as he obsessively tries to transform Judy into his Madeleine, taking that resemblance as a starting point, polishing and fine-tuning her into the yearned-for image of his unacceptably lost love.

But Judy is scared, because she knows what Scottie and we still don’t. The key moment of the film – truly revolutionary from the dramatic and narrative point of view – is the revelation (for us the spectators, when we hear Judy writing her confession; Scottie’s realisation will still take a bit longer) of what really happened on the top of the bell tower of the Mission. This is a moment that gives a different sense to everything we think we know, and changes our point of view: we shift from Scottie’s viewpoint – from the sadness and desperation we’ve shared – to Judy’s, which allows us to consider her as a victim.

The fifth mise en scène begins when Judy, trapped by the love she had to feign for Scottie when she was experiencing his so intensely, gives herself away – almost abandons herself to love – with an indirect confession. (It’s difficult to know to what extent it’s conscious on Judy’s part; is she even jealous of the fictitious Madeleine, who was herself?)

When Scottie tries to regain control of the drama – which will now be that of vengeance, as he is determined to force a confession out of Judy – he will drag her to her death. And this is the definitive disappearance of Madeleine that will drive Scottie to the absolute void. In the end, Scottie is left ‘suspended’ over the abyss, just as he was when a compassionate fade-out closed the film’s prologue of the police chase over the roofs of San Francisco.

During this gradual process of spiral ascents and falls, punctuated by ominous low and high angles, we the viewers are successively – or simultaneously – busybodies and onlookers, meddlers and dupes, accomplices and sceptics, co-scriptwriters and extras, witnesses and victims of three machinations: Elster’s, Scottie’s and – above both of them, permanent and masterly – Hitchcock’s.

 Miguel Marías

Sight & Sound 2012 poll essay

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/greatest-films-all-time/forever-falling-vertigo

[martechadvisor-blog]

RFPs: Time for the Dinosaurs of the Business World to Go Extinct

Modern businesses succeed when they’re fast and efficient. In the digital age, customers expect to have their needs met in “real-time,” no matter where they are on the planet. If you can’t help them, remember, someone who can, is just a click away, writes Michael Hiskey, Head of Strategy, Semarchy.  Modern businesses succeed when fast and efficient. In the digital age, customers expect to have their needs met in “real-time,” no matter where they are on the planet. If you can’t help them, someone who can is a click away.

Given this reality, it’s dismaying to see so many companies relying on one of the slowest, most obtuse practices for business projects: the RFP, or Request for Proposal. RFPs originated in the early days of the Industrial Revolution when slow communication and transportation afforded companies the time to search for and evaluate solutions.

In the two centuries since, technology has drastically changed commercial activity, yet 95% of companies still use RFPs when they need to acquire new applications, outsource IT, and complete projects. The intentions are sensible—transform the business while reducing the costs of in-house projects—but the process no longer fits the reality.

Resolving the RFP Paradox: Go Big by Starting Small

Business projects are about real-world results, and when businesses need new projects, they should be looking to successful startups. By virtue of not being big, legacy players in their space, startups thrive on innovation and growth—locating and exploiting the inefficiencies of existing platforms as business needs change.

Because startups are comprised of a relatively small group of extremely dedicated employees who are natural risk-takers, they can be lazily miscast as sandbox idealists. But there’s a reason that their total global economy value creation from 2015-2017 was $2.3 trillion, up 25.6% from the previous two-year cycle: their ability to deliver results.

Logic would dictate that businesses, seeing growth, revenue, and value opportunities in small startups would be more comfortable with finding these innovative companies. But the RFP, that entrenched process for obtaining contractors, often disadvantages startups.

For instance, RFPs are by nature long processes. One study found that a single RFP takes 25-50 hours of draft response, weeks or months for a finalist search, weeks or even months, travel, research, and a full project plan, at an average cost of $5,000 before a winning bid. For a company that engages in 10, 20, or more RFPs per month, costs can escalate into the hundreds of thousands of dollars before a single win.

RFPs also have obscure age requirements, where bidders have to specify how long they’ve been in the business. The best reason for this is the abstract sense of comfort and familiarity—after all, “No one gets fired for buying from IBM.”

But these requirements and mindsets are antithetical to the purpose of the RFP in the first place. New business projects are by definition risky. To succeed, they need quick, smart proposals that don’t break the bidder’s bank. The RFP does the opposite. Something has to give.

The Next Generation of the RFP: Proof of Value (POV)

Imagine the ability to quickly determine a solution’s value. That’s what a proof-of-value (POV) does. Based on Information Measurement Theory (IMT), a POV predicts a project’s risks, value, and time to completion.

By replacing the RFP, the POV wouldn’t eliminate the process of finding capable contractors; it would reconstruct it on fairness and results. By expediting procedures and cutting to the chase, it would do away with the lethargy that stems from focusing on all the wrong pieces.

Startups specialize in POVs because the form mimics their fast-paced, low-cost, constantly risk-evaluating innovative style. As experts in their space, small companies can easily assemble POVs, especially if they’re free from requirements of size, age, and incumbency, the arbitrary factors that are minimally correlated with the ability to deliver a successful solution.

MVP and Growth Hacking: How Startups Quickly Create and Scale Products

If POVs replaced RFPs, businesses would be able to quickly establish whether the bidders should advance to the next stage of the process: the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). A first iteration solution that delivers basic project needs in anticipation of a final product, an MVP immediately engages business users and develops user connectivity.

For IT projects that are the synthesis of apps, software, and branding, the benefits of an MVP are manifold: the business learns within weeks if the solution can work. If so, startups have the platform for another one of their specialties: growth hacking.

Growth hacking can be the final stage of a business project. Get a bunch of engineers, developers, and marketers together and let them hack their way to growth. The key is to monitor it—to give the team real-time feedback that helps it run tests to develop iteration product initiatives that combine innovation with scalability.

Successful growth hacking isn’t likely to occur at a large company inundated with whiteboard bureaucracy. It thrives in an innovative environment—when the process for project development is quick and agile, not slow and aging.

Conclusion

The RFP came about during the pre-locomotive, horse-and-buggy era. The world has moved on, but the RFP has remained stubbornly in place. The mismatch has resulted in the pursuit of perfection at a high opportunity cost, bringing to mind Voltaire’s quote that “the best is the enemy of the good.” Today’s businesses have enterprise tools available to always strive for excellence. It’s time for them to rethink the path there and trust themselves to find the companies to execute.  

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

[jerneyinterventiondesign]

Online identity: is authenticity or anonymity more important? (2012)

Before Facebook and Google became the megaliths of the web, the most famous online adage was, "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog". It seems the days when people were allowed to be dogs is coming to a close. The old web, a place where identity could remain separate from real life, is rapidly disappearing from the computer screen. According to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, and Richard Allan, its director of policy in Europe, a critical mass of people only want online interactions supported by "authentic" identity. And this, say critics, will have irrevocable effects on the openness of the web.

The pursuit of authenticity is creeping into the heart of most social media models and in the current internet landscape is playing an important role in how we engage with one another and with web content. For many people, Facebook and Google products are the sum total of their web interaction, and the value in creating a platform that provides confidence that a person is who they say they are, rather someone pretending to be them, is critical to a social network's success.

Within this model, authentic identity is non-anonymous. Facebook profiles and Google IDs are tied to a person's real name and real connections, and increasingly to their activities across cyberspace. Users are familiar with logging into other services using Facebook or Google IDs, forming a single public identity that's an aggregated version of their offline past, the online present and their combined future.

Facebook also believes authenticity is linked to a person's photo stream, which is why it has just paid $1bn for the photo-sharing service Instagram. "Pictures speak a thousand words," says Allan. "Immigration officials will ask to see a photo album to see if a relationship is genuine. It's a very instinctive and powerful way to confirm authentic identity."

Not everyone agrees. "I would not call what you have on Facebook 'authentic' identity," says Christopher Poole, the 24-year-old creator of 4Chan, an online community founded in 2004. 4Chan boasts two design features antithetical to Facebook: first, its 20 million users don't register an account to participate and are therefore anonymous; second, there's no archive.

Poole, who was voted Time's most influential person of 2008 – two years before Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was declared the magazine's Man of the Year – believes Facebook's commercial motivations shut down the online experience: "Mark and Sheryl have gone out and said that identity is authenticity, that you are online who you are offline, and to have multiple identities is lacking in integrity. I think that's nuts."

"We went from a web that was interest-driven, and then we transitioned into a web where the connections were in-person, real-life friendship relationships," adds Poole. "Individuals are multifaceted. Identity is prismatic, and communities like 4Chan exist as a holdover from the interest-driven web."

Allan (Facebook) believes such attitudes are naive. The millions who have gone online over the past decade want a safe place where they won't experience bad behaviour, have their identities stolen or be duped by impostors, he says: "Pretend identities don't work very well now that the web has moved from a minority sport for geeks to a mainstream occupation."

“Any profile on Facebook or Google that is not tied to an offline name is removed.”

And this attitude is baked into the main players' systems: any profile on Facebook or Google that does not appear to be tied to an offline name is removed. Nicknames and pseudonyms, regardless of their longevity – and some have been in use for decades – are considered breaches of terms of service. What people do online now, and will be doing in the foreseeable future, is inherently tied to their offline selves. And this locks down what it is considered acceptable to do and who it is acceptable to meet.

Yet a social network's success need not rely upon this direct link between online and offline identity. In Japan, the three most popular social networks operate under pseudonyms at the discretion of the account holder. "[Japanese social networks are] anonymous, but we can trace past mentions by login ID or nickname," explains Yasutaka Yuno, editor-in-chief of Japan's most popular mobile technology site, K-tai Watch. "The past mentions are useful to judge credibility. In each social community, ID acts as personal name."

“When users are aware that their activities online are traceable, identity play continues.”

An online identity can be as permanent as an offline one: pseudonymous users often identify themselves in different social networks using the same account name. But because their handles aren't based on real names, they can deliberately delineate their identity accordingly, and reassert anonymity if they wish. Psychologists argue that this is valuable for the development of a sense of who one is, who one can be, and how one fits into different contexts. This kind of activity is allowed even in countries where social network account holders are required to register for a service using a national ID, as in South Korea and China; their online public identities are still fabrications. Even with this explicit link with the state, when users are aware that their activities online are traceable, identity play continues.

Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor Project, hopes to re-anonymise the web. "The ability to be anonymous is increasingly important because it gives people control, it lets them be creative, it lets them figure out their identity and explore what they want to do, or to research topics that aren't necessarily 'them' and may not want tied to their real name for perpetuity," he says.

The Tor browser and software obfuscates a user's web traffic so anyone watching is unable to trace who a user is or where they are coming from, by bouncing an individual's communications through at least three different places. People can still be identifiable on a service like Facebook or Google if they choose to log in, but Tor prevents these sites knowing what users were doing before, and where they go after they log out.

This is a technological solution to what Lewman feels is an elemental problem with the de-anonymisation of the web. "The ability to forget, to start over is important," he argues. "Maybe you just got divorced, maybe you just came out of rehab and you want to start over.

"As soon as you log into a Gmail account, you start getting ads for the drug rehab you want to forget. If you're in a real-name environment, such as Facebook, unless you actually physically change your name and your friends, you're thrown right back into your old life."

Although Facebook does allow users to curate what's public and private – "recasting your public persona by selecting from the data you've put onto the service," explains Allan – Lewman believes the automated systems make a total social reinvention difficult to pull off.

"If you truly wanted to be anonymous, you'd have to use a combination of 4Chan and Tor," explains Poole. Tor provides the back-end anonymity that complements 4Chan's front-end anonymity. But this is technologically advanced: it is the major players setting the identity agenda. And so the ideological battle over online identity continues.

"Facebook is setting the expectations of what we want," says Poole. "They set the bar in terms of what kind of control their users have over their identity online. They've been moving that bar slowly but surely in a direction that they might call transparency, but what other people might call lack of choice."

Allan believes the benefits of authentic identity outweigh the costs. Facebook and other services with an assurance of security and credibility are more inclusive, and open up the web to new audiences who never would have gone online before, he says. "We're optimists. Facebook enables hundreds of millions of people to express themselves online because they didn't have or know how to use the tools they needed." Facebook, he believes, is a stepping stone to the rest of the web.

And if they are successful at promoting their particular brand of authentic identity, if you want to be a dog on the internet in the future, you'll have to have papers to prove it.