Anonymity

Anonymity is the condition of being unknown, without a name or lacking an identity. This may also be termed facelessness, or lacking a face.

Anonymity is a common characteristic of people in public places (such as sidewalks, crowds or shopping malls) and of cash-based market transactions. Anonymity is also closely related to certain aspects of the problem of privacy. In some respects, anonymity is the antithesis of community - in small, traditional, and closely-knit communities no one is anonymous and everyone has a recognizable name, face and identity.

The problem of anonymity is a particular interesting and dynamic one in online contexts, especially in the broad set of media, software, websites, and venues identified as Web 2.0. Particularly when encountering existing or created web pages, the anonymous reader, known only to herself, frequently encounters an equally anonymous author.

The problem of online anonymity is a vexing one: to some, every anonymous participant online is a potential troll, terrorist, extortionist, pedophile or other criminal or anti-social being, while others seek in anonymity the protection of their privacy, and support for freer expression. The moderate middle balancing anonymity with responsibility for one's online actions, while desirable, has yet to be fully realized in a large number of online instances.

Pseudonyms, or fabricated names, whether or not the fabrication is obvious, are a common online phenomenon. Sometimes pneumonic devices may be used, whether or not they have meaning to the creator. Thus Betty Rice, who only a few close friends know plays in a bell choir, for example, may seek to retain her online anonymity with the pseudonym Bell Ringer.

The condition of being anonymous seldom appears among lists of key concepts in social science theories but is nonetheless related in complex ways to several important social and political ideas: It shares a first syllable (and common Greek origin) with anomie, for example, and is theoretically related as well to anarchy; the concern being that persons nameless or unknown may constitute threats to social order or moral order. The condition of anonymity is also closely linked to the social psychological concept of personal identity.

Philosophically, important issues revolve around the question of the nature of existence of that which lacks a name or is fully unknown.

In politics and community theory, the concept of anonymity is often linked with the idea of membership: the outside is a stranger, an unknown person without a name or an identity, not one of us, not a member of our community. Robert and Sara Morris, in a book subtitled Why Care for the Stranger? argued that this is a concept with particularly important consequences in social welfare policy. The poor and certain other disadvantaged populations who are the traditional subjects of welfare policy, they suggest, have long been largely anonymous - 'not one of us' - and hence, not really part of the community.

Anonymity can also have positive political uses. Many nations, for example, pay tribute to all fallen heroes in monuments like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington DC in which an anonymous corpse of a soldier from an unidentified war is buried.