TY  - JOUR
T1  - Analysis of the Impact of Anonymity on Members' Use of Words in Online Communities
AU  - Hwang, Byeonghwa 
AU  - Lee, Eun-Kyu 
JO  - The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/1/1
DO  - 10.7840/kics.2025.50.1.105
KW  - Anonymity
KW  - concealability
KW  - online community
KW  - use of words
KW  - DCinside
KW  - privacy
KW  - data processing
AB  - With the advancement of the information technology, various “Things” that existed in reality have been transferred to the Internet world. Social meetings and clubs are also appearing through the “Internet community”. The Internet is basically characterized by anonymity. That is, users in the community can hide who they are, and a personality different from reality can be expressed through another me expressed only in the cyber world. Previous studies have tried to explain the negative impact of the Internet on society based on aggression and violence behind the anonymity. In the past, Internet users showed their negativity with a mask of anonymity simply to hide themselves. However, today, since it has been understood that this mask can be revealed by someone, the focus has been on hiding “I,” the essence of anonymity. In other words, the concealment of anonymity is characterized by aggression appearing according to the will of the user because the mask is put forward, in the past and now, but it can be seen that aggression inevitably attracts more attention because it eventually brings a negative effect. Therefore, in this study, we examine the difference in word use behavior of community users according to the anonymity characteristics of the Internet. Experimental results have shown that there are users who only want to show concealment and that their use of words does not show much difference from other anonymity characteristics.