Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T02:32:23.009Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2018

HANS ASENBAUM
HANS ASENBAUM*
Affiliation:
University of Westminster
*
Hans Asenbaum is a PhD Candidate and Visiting Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW, United Kingdom ([email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Although anonymity is a central feature of liberal democracies—not only in the secret ballot, but also in campaign funding, publishing political texts, masked protests, and graffiti—it has so far not been conceptually grounded in democratic theory. Rather, it is treated as a self-explanatory concept related to privacy. To overcome this omission, this article develops a complex understanding of anonymity in the context of democratic theory. Drawing upon the diverse literature on anonymity in political participation, it explains anonymity as a highly context-dependent identity performance expressing private sentiments in the public sphere. The contradictory character of its core elements—identity negation and identity creation—results in three sets of contradictory freedoms. Anonymity affords (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. This contradictory character of anonymity's affordances illustrates the ambiguous role of anonymity in democracy.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 112 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 459 - 472
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am indebted to Graham Smith for relentless support, advice, and inspiring conversations. For helpful feedback, I would like to thank Matthew Fluck. I am also very grateful to John Dryzek, Selen Ercan, Nicole Curato, Simon Niemeyer, Lucy Parry, and everyone who participated in the seminar at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra, and to Dorotheé de Nève and her team at the University of Giessen. Moreover, this article has benefitted from inspiring comments of three anonymous reviewers, which I am very grateful for.

References

REFERENCES

Akdeniz, Yaman. 2002. “Anonymity, Democracy, and Cyberspace.” Social Research 69 (2): 223–37.Google Scholar
Alcoff, Linda. 1991. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20 (20): 5–32.Google Scholar
Asenbaum, Hans. 2018. “Cyborg Activism: Exploring the Reconfigurations of Democratic Subjectivity in Anonymous.” New Media & Society 20 (4): 1543–63.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1996. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Barendt, Eric. 2016. Anonymous Speech: Literature, Law and Politics. Oxford: Hart Publishing.Google Scholar
Bartlett, Jamie. 2015. The Dark Net. London: Windmill Books.Google Scholar
Bastos, Marco, and Mercea, Dan. 2017. “The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News.” Social Science Computer Review, 1–18.Google Scholar
Baxter, Hillary. 2015. “Masquerade, Pride, Drag, Love and Marriage.” In Masquerade: Essays on Tradition and Innovation Worldwide, ed. Bell, Deborah. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 103–12.Google Scholar
Berlin, Isaiah. (1958) 1969. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 118–72.Google Scholar
Bessi, Alessandro, and Ferrara, Emilio. 2016. “Social Bots Distort the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Online Discussion.” First Monday 21: 1–14.Google Scholar
Beyer, Jessica. 2014. “The Emergence of a Freedom of Information Movement: Anonymous, WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party, and Iceland.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (19): 141–54.Google Scholar
Blau, Adrian. 2004. “Against Positive and Negative Freedom.” Political Theory 32 (4): 547–53.Google Scholar
Blee, Kathleen, and McDowell, Amy. 2013. “The Duality of Spectacle and Secrecy: A Case Study of Fraternalism in the 1920s US Ku Klux Klan.” 36 (2): 249–65.Google Scholar
Bruce, Caitlin. 2015. “The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free Pussy Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12 (1): 42–62.Google Scholar
Bruner, Lane. 2005. “Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State.” Text and Performance Quarterly 25 (5): 136–55.Google Scholar
Buchstein, Hubertus. 1997. “Bytes That Bite: The Internet and Deliberative Democracy.” Constellations 4 (2): 248–63.Google Scholar
Butler, Ella. 2006. “The Anthropology of Anonymity: Toilet Graffiti at the University of Melbourne.” 30. Research Paper Series of the University of Melbourne. School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies. Melbourne.Google Scholar
Cambre, Maria-Carolina. 2014. “Becoming Anonymous: A Politics of Masking.” In Educational, Psychological, and Behavioral Considerations in Niche Online Communities, eds. Venkatesh, Vivek, Wallin, Jason, Castro, Juan Carlos, and Lewis, Jason Edward. Hershey: Information Science Reference, 297–321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cardell, Kylie, and Maguire, Emma. 2015. “Hoax Politics: Blogging, Betrayal, and the Intimate Public of A Gay Girl in Damascus.” Biography 38 (2): 205–21.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jean. 1992. “Redescribing Privacy: Identity, Difference, and the Abortion Controversy.” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 3 (3): 43–117.Google Scholar
Coleman, Gabriella. 2014. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London: Verso.Google Scholar
da Vinci, Leonardo. 2005. The Da Vinci Notebooks. London: Profile Books.Google Scholar
Diaz, Claudia, Seys, Stefaan, Claessens, Joris, and Preneel, Bart. 2003. “Towards Measuring Anonymity.” In Privacy Enhancing Technologies, eds. Dingledine, Roger and Syverson, Paul. Berlin: Springer, 54–68.Google Scholar
Dovi, Suzanne. 2009. “In Praise of Exclusion.” The Journal of Politics 71 (3): 1172–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferry, Anne. 2002. “‘Anonymity’: The Literary History of a Word.” New Literary History 33 (2): 193–214.Google Scholar
Freire, Paulo. (1970) 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26: 56–80.Google Scholar
Fromm, Erich. 1941. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.Google Scholar
Gardner, James. 2011. “Anonymity and Democratic Citizenship.” William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 19 (4):927–57.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Griffin, Robert. 1999. “Anonymity and Authorship.” New Literary History 30 (4): 877–95.Google Scholar
Groeneveld, Elizabeth. 2015. “Are We All Pussy Riot? On Narratives of Feminist Return and the Limits of Transnational Solidarity.” Feminist Theory 16 (3): 289–307.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. 1st paperb. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Halpin, Harry. 2012. “The Philosophy of Anonymous: Ontological Politics without Identity.” Radical Philosophy (176): 19–28.Google Scholar
Hunter, Christopher. 2002. “Political Privacy and Online Politics: How E-Campaigning Threatens Voter Privacy.” First Monday 7 (2).Google Scholar
Jonker, Hugo, and Pieters, Wolter. 2010. “Anonymity in Voting Revisited.” In Towards Trustworthy Elections: New Directions in Electronic Voting, eds. Chaum, David et al. Berlin: IAVOSS/Springer-Verlag, 216–30.Google Scholar
Kinney, Alison. 2016. Hood. New York: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Kopley, Emily. 2016. “Anon Is Not Dead: Towards a History of Anonymous Authorship in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain.” Studies in Book Culture 7 (2): 1–23.Google Scholar
Kuran, Timur. 1993. “Mitigating the Tyranny of Public Opinion: Anonymous Discourse and the Ethic of Sincerity.” Constitutional Political Economy 4 (1): 41–78.Google Scholar
Leitner, John. 2015. “Anonymity, Privacy, and Expressive Equality: Name Verification and Korean Constitutional Rights in Cyberspace.” Journal of Korean Law 14 (June): 167–212.Google Scholar
Lynch, Michael, and Madonna, Anthony. 2013. “Viva Voce: Implications from the Disappearing Voice Vote, 1865–1996.” Social Science Quarterly 94 (2): 530–50.Google Scholar
MacCallum, Gerald. 1967. “Negative and Positive Freedom.” Philosophical Review 76 (3): 312–34.Google Scholar
Marx, Gary. 1999. “What's in a Name? Some Reflections on the Sociology of Anonymity.” The Information Society 15 (2): 99–112.Google Scholar
McCarthy, Matthew. 2015. “Toward a Free Information Movement.” Sociological Forum 30 (2): 439–58.Google Scholar
McDonald, Kevin. 2015. “From Indymedia to Anonymous: Rethinking Action and Identity in Digital Cultures.” Information, Communication & Society 18 (8): 968–82.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. 1946. On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Moore, Alfred. 2017. “Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Deliberation: Why Not Everything Should Be Connected.” The Journal of Political Philosophy 1–24.Google Scholar
Morris, Adam. 2012. “Whoever, Whatever: On Anonymity as Resistance to Empire.” Parallax 18 (4): 106–20.Google Scholar
Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2015. “The Hoodie as Sign, Screen, Expectation, and Force.” Signs 40 (4): 791–816.Google Scholar
Nissenbaum, Helen. 1997. “Toward an Approach to Privacy in Public: Challenges of Information Technology.” Ethics & Behavior 7 (3): 207–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nissenbaum, Helen. 1999. “The Meaning of Anonymity in an Information Age.” The Information Society: An International Journal 15 (2): 141–44.Google Scholar
Nissenbaum, Helen. 2010. Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Papacharissi, Zizi. 2010. A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Pfitzmann, Andreas, and Hansen, Marit. 2010. A Terminology for Talking about Privacy by Data Minimization: Anonymity, Unlinkability, Undetectability, Unobservability, Pseudonymity, and Identity Management. http://www.maroki.de/pub/dphistory/2010_Anon_Terminology_v0.34.pdf.Google Scholar
Reiman, Jeffrey. 1976. “Privacy, Intimacy, and Personhood.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 6 (1): 26–44.Google Scholar
Rodriguez, Armado, and Clair, Robin. 1999. “Graffiti as Communication: Exploring the Discursive Tensions of Anonymous Texts.” The Southern Communication Journal 65 (1): 1–15.Google Scholar
Ruiz, Pollyanna. 2013. “Revealing Power: Masked Protest and the Blank Figure.” Cultural Politics 9 (3): 263–79.Google Scholar
Schmitz, Rachel. 2016. “Intersections of Hate: Exploring the Transecting Dimensions of Race, Religion, Gender, and Family in Ku Klux Klan Web Sites.” Sociological Focus 49 (3): 200–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Craig. 1998. “To Reveal or Not to Reveal: A Theoretical Model of Anonymous Communication.” Communication Theory 8 (4): 381–407.Google Scholar
Smith Ekstrand, Victoria, and Jeyaram, Cassandra Imfeld. 2011. “Our Founding Anonymity: Anonymous Speech During the Constitutional Debate.” American Journalism 28 (3): 35–60.Google Scholar
Spiegel, Jennifer. 2015. “Masked Protest in the Age of Austerity: State Violence, Anonymous Bodies, and Resistance ‘In the Red.’” Critical Inquiry 41 (4): 786–810.Google Scholar
Steinholt, Yngvar. 2013. “Kitten Heresy: Lost Contexts of Pussy Riot's Punk Prayer.” Popular Music and Society 36 (1): 120–4.Google Scholar
Suler, John. 2004. “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” CyberPsychology & Behavior 7 (3): 321–26.Google Scholar
Tiqqun. 2008. How Is It to Be Done? http://cnqzu.com/library/Politics/Invisible-Committee-How-it-be-done.pdf.Google Scholar
Wagner Decew, Judith. 2015. “The Feminist Critique of Privacy: Past Arguments and New Social Understandings.” In Social Dimensions of Privacy, eds. Roessler, Beaate and Mokrosinska, Dorota. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 85–103.Google Scholar
Wallace, Kathleen. 1999. “Anonymity.” Ethics and Information Technology 1 (1): 23–35.Google Scholar
Warren, Samuel, and Brandeis, Louis. 2016. “The Right to Privacy.” Harvard Law Review 4 (5): 193–220.Google Scholar
Wesch, Michael, and the Digital Ethnography Class of Spring 2009. 2012. “Anonymous, Anonymity, and the End(s) of Identity and Groups Online: Lessons from the ‘First Internet-Based Superconsciousness.’” In Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology, eds. Whitehead, Neal and Wesch, Michael. Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 89–104.Google Scholar
Westin, Alan. 1984. “The Origins of Modern Claims to Privacy.” In Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, ed. Schoeman, Ferdinand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 56–74.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. 2007. The Critic as Artist (Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything). Stockport: Mondial.Google Scholar
Woo, Jisuk. 2006. “The Right Not to Be Identified: Privacy and Anonymity in the Interactive Media Environment.” New Media & Society 8 (6): 949–67.Google Scholar
Zakaria, Rafia. 2017. Veil. New York: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.