"I hear his name bandied about a lot, but I don't know him. I don't know who Henson is. He seems to have his hand in a lot of things around here, but I don't particularly know what that means."
-- Kermit The Frog, the world's best known sockpuppet, on the topic of his creator, Jim Henson.
Puppetry is the art of animating an inanimate object and using it to tell a story. It originated, it is estimated, around 30,000 BC, and the art is still around, not only in shows like the Muppets, but in the guise of people and organizations creating fake online personas.
Maybe you are already using this technique. Have you ever lied about who you are online? Do you have multiple identities for social networks such as Facebook or
Twitter that aren't explicitly tied to you? Do you have email addresses that you use to be anonymous even if it's just to stop getting spammed? These are all aspects of what are called "
sockpuppets").
In short, the practice of using sockpuppets has moved from ad hoc, user ploys to hide or obfuscate personal goals, through to corporations using them to service marketing strategies, to becoming integral to government surveillance programs. Who you friend, what you say, who your friends are, and what you post could all become data points in commercial or government repositories that will log you, identify you, track you and, if you use your own sockpuppets, attempt to integrate your personas into one view of who and what you are.
So, the next time you engage with someone online who you don't really know, just consider that you could well be interacting with a sockpuppet and you'll have no idea whose hand is driving it.
The sockpuppet could belong to some guy in Ackron, Ohio, looking for a "good time," or to a marketing company out of New York trying to change your opinion about which brand of cola is best, or to some government spook from who-knows-where and who-knows-what-country collecting information on you and your friends for who-knows-what-purpose.
