I was talking about something similar earlier today with a friend from high school. We were talking about how it was totally un-cool to disagree with the "consensus" about which girls were hot and which were not. We were imagining what it might have been like if we'd felt able to speak our minds.
I'm not a huge believer in the whole "social media toppled authoritarian regimes" stories that have been going around after Tunisia/Egypt but I do think that to the extent real anonymity is possible it has the potential to help people living in places where dissent is both stigmatised and punished by allowing them to realise that others feel the same way.
This Steven Pinker talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU (I think; I don't have Flash so can't check it's the right one) talks about why this type of communication is essential to free societies and why freedom of assembly is protected in all free societies.
On the same general topic researchers in public health give people some wiggle room on truth telling by introducing random noise into their responses in order to improve the aggregate quality of information you get from asking them questions about controversial topics (drug use, sexuality): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response
tl;dr: anything that helps people tell the truth rather than timidly conforming to social norms is a good thing
I'm not a huge believer in the whole "social media toppled authoritarian regimes" stories that have been going around after Tunisia/Egypt but I do think that to the extent real anonymity is possible it has the potential to help people living in places where dissent is both stigmatised and punished by allowing them to realise that others feel the same way.
This Steven Pinker talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU (I think; I don't have Flash so can't check it's the right one) talks about why this type of communication is essential to free societies and why freedom of assembly is protected in all free societies.
On the same general topic researchers in public health give people some wiggle room on truth telling by introducing random noise into their responses in order to improve the aggregate quality of information you get from asking them questions about controversial topics (drug use, sexuality): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response
tl;dr: anything that helps people tell the truth rather than timidly conforming to social norms is a good thing