'Being' and 'Feeling' Anonymous Online
Sunday, August 23, 2009 by Anonymous
I felt Kennedy's study in the reading this week had some weaknesses. Firstly, the students were all female, mature, working class and ethnically a minority; they were chosen because they best represented 'the digital divide' but this is highly problematic. The fact these women were largely computer illiterate, having grown up only gauging 'one' reality (just life, not cyberspace) meant they were pre-disposed to treat the construction of their homepages as logical extensions to their real-world identities - which they did. Kennedy maybe should have compared them to people growing up fully immersed with computers as a space of (potentially) alternate reality, where the internet in particular is connoted to be (by other media too) a 'wormhole' where one can disappear and either map, embellish or subvert their offline self - no doubt more creative identity 'performance' (Butler) would have been rampant here. Secondly, her treatment of the very word 'anonymity' I felt was hazy. There seemed to be a rupture in the definition. 'Anonymity' she originally sees as pertaining to truth value and loyalty to the offline self ("the students did not engage in the presentation of anonymous identities" i.e. no disjuncture between online and offline identity). Then she ackowledges "there were (nevertheless) traces of anonymity in internet identites" without reminding us 'anonymity' used here refers not to truth value but to the perceived level of privacy one is operating with on the homepages - a completely different context.
It seemed the students in Kennedy's study 'felt' anonymous (privacy) in their sanctuary of their homepage, but they didn't 'be' anonymous (they maintained high truth value) because their homepages reflected and mapped onto their offline selves.
It seemed the students in Kennedy's study 'felt' anonymous (privacy) in their sanctuary of their homepage, but they didn't 'be' anonymous (they maintained high truth value) because their homepages reflected and mapped onto their offline selves.
Great post. I think your critique picks up on some good issues and the charge of a certain haziness may well be valid. I would say, in the author's defence, that her conclusions about the state of anonymity in contemporary digital culture is based not only her own limited empirical study but also on a growing body of research more broadly that questions the binary between online and offline selves as well as the celebration of identity fragmentation detectable in earlier cyberspace discourse (both academic and popular).
As for the distinction between being and feeling anonymous, I agree that it is limited but I nevertheless feel it's an important starting point in deconstructing what we mean by anonymity. For some of her reearch subjects, the feeling of anonymity was a sense of feeling safe enough that they could speak out and disclose their inner worlds more than they might in the offline. So I see this as a subjective state. By contrast, objectively speaking, they were not actually anonymous (the being anonymous part). I take this distinction to be more important in cases where the online sphere is, as you put it, an extension of real-world identities. Presumably, by contrast, in cases where people construct wholly new personas online, it is normally necessary to actually be anonymous in order to go down that path. Does that make sense?
hi Luke thanks yep that makes sense.
eg. second life tries to construct an alternate reality: there is emphasis on both 'being' anonymous and 'feeling' anonymous ..a disconnection from the offline self
vs. more offline self-grounded social networks like facebook where they operate around the mere mediation of the offline self (most people on them would reject 'being' anonymous and 'feeling' anonymous - it is an arena of authenticity rather than 'play'.
You put it better than me, for sure!