The Internet changed quietly. Over roughly a decade, the background colors of Web pages slowly lightened from black to white. Text, once a riot of fonts and colors, settled into a serious and respectable black in most places. Advertisements used to be mostly flickering banners at the top and sides of the page. Now brands want to be your friend and constantly ask you to “like” their pages and join their hashtag revolutions.
But the most important evolution has been the shift away from widespread anonymity online to repeated requests for your real name and photos, usually on a variety of social networks. Is the World Wide Web safer with the decline of anonymity, or have we traded one set of threats for another?
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