Designing Anonymity

TL;DR

This paper explores the multifaceted concept of anonymity, emphasizing its importance for privacy, protection, and knowledge production, especially amid technological challenges to anonymity.

Contribution

It offers a novel perspective by focusing on how anonymity can facilitate new forms of knowledge creation, beyond its traditional privacy and accountability roles.

Findings

Anonymity enables protection against discrimination.

Anonymity supports participation in stigmatized activities.

Research on anonymity can reveal new insights into knowledge production.

Abstract

Creating anonymity means cutting connections. A common goal in this context is to prevent accountability. This prevention of accountability can be problematic, for example, if it leads to delinquents remaining undetected. However, imputability can also provide protection against discrimination. In medical, religious or legal matters, this is of fundamental importance. Thus, when individuals actively establish anonymity, they do so mostly because they want to prevent certain information about them, that is, sensitive and/or compromising information, from being associated with their identities. By remaining inaccessible as individuals with respect to certain information about them, they can engage in forms of exchange that would otherwise be impossible for them. Examples include practices of exchange in (self-organized) therapy groups, acting out stigmatized sexual preferences, the role of anonymity in the performing arts, or political resistance movements. Given the variety of examples in which personal anonymity is important, it is not surprising that it is primarily these personal dimensions that are the focus of current debates about the increasing precariousness of anonymity in the face of new technical possibilities of data mining and processing. In this paper, we nevertheless - or precisely because of this - want to focus on another aspect of anonymity that has received much less attention so far. Namely, we assume that researching and working with and about anonymity can open up new perspectives on and for contemporary forms of knowledge production.