The Culture of Digital Anonymity

The Blurred Lines between Anonymity and Free Speech

Living in a time where the world is so digitalized, anonymity is scarce. Privacy is something we lack in our daily lives when it comes to social media and how advertisements get our information from sites like Facebook or Instagram “spying on us”. In my house, my mom hung up a sign that says ‘be careful, what you do today will be on Facebook tomorrow’. This could not be more accurate with how often we overshare and update our profiles- even sites like Barstool sports post videos that people send them of others without permission. This is why the website Reddit has become so popular. The creator of 4Chan states, “It’s about giving people a place to worship freely. Under the confession booth’s guise of anonymity, they’ll share some deep, demented secrets, shit they’ve never told anyone — but they’ll tell an anonymous forum”. This is exactly why Reddit has an estimated 7 billion users per month.

Within sites like Reddit or Tumblr, the user is the producer of the content and they have the ability to get their voices heard. Within Miller’s chapter he makes the argument that global capitalism and the participatory and collective converged media culture, that democracy and control over content in general is diminished. He uses the term ‘produsage’ to explain how our global culture is produced by a communal environment and the process is unfinished This allows for open participation, fluid hierarchy, and individual rewards. For Reddit, I saw a meme that when people get a lot of “up arrows” it’s satisfying- a digital high five. This cross-media outlet needs a participatory culture and the anonymity allows for people to get out of their comfort zone knowing whatever they say will not have personal consequences. Every individual has access to post anything, however, do we trust that the content being produced won’t be harmful? Technology has given us the ability to connect with millions of strangers whenever we want.

On the home page I noticed that people worked together to give the author of the post advice and their own personal experiences. This reminded me of Miller’s collective intelligence- when individuals come together to collectively solve common problems. In class we discussed it people coming together to solve things, like the website Wikipedia where people use their knowledge to fact check. However, a lot of it was solely trying to help one another on personal situations which I was surprised to see, I expected people to be a lot more disrespectful on some of these posts. The digital culture is an interesting one full of both hate and support.

When I created a Reddit, I was very confused at it’s structure. I started typing in random things I was interested in like American Horror Story, Joe Rogan, Food, Dogs, etc. I noticed on the home page that many people turned to this website for advice. When I tried to find deeper topics I found a ‘men’s rights’ page and a ‘women’s rights page’. I was surprised that these pages all had consistent comments and were very supportive of what one another was posting. I would not have expected this, because of the discussion behind the misogyny on Reddit. I decided to comment on a random post I saw about animal abuse. I noticed many people discussed on the reddit potential solutions which I thought was interesting- and reminded me of collective intelligence again.

Within The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens, the author discusses the importance for us to relate to one another which is exactly what the internet enables. On Reddit, I thought about how only subscribing and looking at the same culture and perspectives on topics can be harmful and put you in this ‘global sphere’ we discussed. Due to Reddit being a widely used platform there are subreddits for almost anything- good and evil. There has been a really blurring line between free speech and morality on these websites that the producers have struggled with. What kind of culture do we want to create online- and how will these websites effect society outside of the digital world?

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