send and receive messages — or to create and maintain a website — behind a mask of anonymity. Lawrence Lessig suggests that "no one knows" because Internet protocols require no user to confirm their own identity. Although a local access point in, for example, a university may require identity confirmation, it holds such information privately, without embedding it in external Internet transactions. A study by Morahan-Martin and Schumacher (2000) on compulsive or troublesome Internet use discusses this phenomenon, suggesting the ability to represent one's self behind the mask of a computer screen may be part of the compulsion to go online. The phrase may be taken "to mean that cyberspace will be liberatory because gender, race, age, looks, or even 'dogness' are potentially absent or alternatively fabricated or exaggerated with unchecked creative license for a multitude of purposes both legal and illegal", an understanding that echoed statements made in 1996 by John Gilmore, a key figure in the history of Usenet. The phrase also indicates the ease of computer cross-dressing: representing oneself as of a different gender; age; race; social, cultural, or economic class, etc. In a similar sense, "the freedom which the dog chooses to avail itself of, is the freedom to 'pass' as part of a privileged group; i.e., human computer users with access to the Internet". In popular culture The cartoon inspired the play Nobody Knows I'm a Dog by Alan David Perkins. The play revolves around six individuals, unable to communicate effectively with people in their lives, who nonetheless find the courage to socialize anonymously on the Internet. The Apple Internet suite Cyberdog was named after this cartoon. The book Authentication: From Passwords to Public Keys by Richard E. Smith displays Steiner's cartoon on the front cover, with the cartoon's dog replicated on the back cover. A cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez published in The New Yorker on February 23, 2015, features a similar pair of dogs watching their owner sitting at a computer, with one asking the other, "Remember when, on the Internet, nobody knew who you were?" It has become a frequently used refrain in discussions about the Internet and as such has become an Internet meme, perhaps iconic to Internet culture. See also Dog with a Blog "The Canine Mutiny" – an episode of The Simpsons where a credit card is approved for the family dog Online identity management References Further reading External links