ABSTRACT:
In July of 1993, a now famous cartoon was published in the New Yorker magazine.1 The cartoon depicts a large black pooch with big floppy ears, sitting on an office chair in front of what is by, today's standards, a rather clunky PC. The pooch - who is talking to a smaller and extremely attentive pup - remarks that, "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog." Besides being humorous, the cartoon demonstrated an important cultural discovery - in 1993, converging communications technologies created the possibility of online anonymity.