Anonymity

No-one wants to be anonymous. At least nobody acts as though they do. The obsessive self-papparization – recording and sharing thoughts, opinions, experiences, lives – for ‘friends’ and subscribed or random publics, are not the acts of the privacy conscious. But all of this me-diatization is not a new narcissism, but rather a consequence of our addictive digital media ecology in which the individual has become the principal motor. 

Psychologists tell us that it is the variability and unpredictability of digital connectivity that delivers the dopamine and hence the need to constantly check, connect, link, like, post, and share. And it is the monetisation of attention, the clickbait society, through which individuals are known in new ways. This includes the algorithmic generation of identity. This is not necessarily about  what you say or who you are, but is rather identification based upon what you click on, where you go and who you communicate with. This is finding, paradoxically, the unknown and unremembered individual, who we would not recognise, made through all our personal data given away, mined, aggregated, sold.

This work asks: who makes and who controls today’s patterns of life, the new futures of me, and to what ends?

The End of Anonymity will be published by Polity Press in 2023.