Ex Animo: Vol. 1, Issue 1

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26369

Browse

Browsing Ex Animo: Vol. 1, Issue 1 by Subject "anonymity"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Disconnecting the Dots: Anonymity in the Digital Age
    (University of Oregon, 2021-05-16) Hanover, Sydney
    Governmental and corporate spying are no longer a surprising facet of everyday life in the digital age. In this paper, I expand upon the implications at stake in debates on autonomy, privacy, and anonymity, and I arrive at a definition of anonymity involving the flow between traits and the inability to connect them based on deliberate non- publication on a structurally social level. I argue that cultivating the space to remain anonymous is useful for distanced association with oneself in the purely private internal sphere, furthering a more fully examined inner association not based on a future already predicted or prematurely acted upon. The privilege of anonymity is a precondition for genuine self-relation. Later, I argue doubly against the “nothing to hide” argument, i.e., if one has nothing to hide, one has nothing to fear. Firstly, the actionability and fabrication of data make it such that it is always at risk of being interpreted as unsafe. Secondly, this argument is predicated on hiddenness as negative, which I answer with an analysis of the functionality of anonymity concerning personal growth.

We use and require that authors grant to the public a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly cited. Click here to view a copy of this license or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. The author retains full copyright ownership for works published in Ex Animo.

For more information about the legal code of the Attribution 4.0 International Creative Commons license, click here.

Ex Animo uses Scholars’ Bank as our archiving system. Authors who submit their research to Scholars’ Bank retain their copyright unless they explicitly give it away to a third party. The University of Oregon Libraries does not seek nor claim copyright on work submitted to Scholars’ Bank. The Libraries ask authors to agree to a non-exclusive distribution license, which means that authors may make copies of their work available on other sites or formally publish their work without obtaining permission from the Libraries.