ANONYMITY AND THE INTERNET

Anonymity and the Internet

ANONYMITY AND THE INTERNET

Background of Internet Anonymity

Certain interaction environments facilitate a sense of anonymity. This has obvious advantages for certain topics or methods of qualitative inquiry. Part of this perception is facilitated by the internet's disconnection from geographic markers, meaning that one's participation in interaction with other people is not necessarily linked to one's physical proximity to others as would be the case in all face-to-face contexts.

In addition to the natural—but not necessary— separation between people interacting via internet-mediated communication, certain interfaces are designed to promote and protect anonymity. These anonymous interaction environments may allow participants to speak more freely without restraints brought about by social norms, mores, and conventions. This feature is useful in studies of risky or deviant behaviors or of socially unacceptable attitudes. (Rebovich, Donald and Jenny, 2000)

Anonymity and geographic distance both complicate and ease ethical considerations. In meeting the ethical requirements for conducting research involving human subjects in most countries, researchers are required to, among other things, gain informed consent. In an anonymous environment, it is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain whether the user is capable of granting informed consent. The physical and legal markers traditionally available to qualitative researchers in the field are obviously absent if the participant wishes to remain bodiless, nameless, and faceless in an online context. This has raised the question of whether regulations associated with informed consent are appropriately designed to protect human subjects. Using the internet as a method of interacting with participants may actually facilitate protection of human subjects; the participants have many outlets to withdraw from the study, and certain interaction environments can improve the likelihood of maintaining confidentiality. These ethical issues require close attention by qualitative researchers. (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1968)

As an interpretive issue rather than a legalistic one, anonymity can be discomfiting for researchers who might not know who the participants are, at least not in any embodied tangible way. This raises concerns about authenticity. On the one hand, interacting with participants in anonymous environments results in the loss of many of the interactional qualities taken for granted in face-to-face interviews and observations. This may constitute a meaningful gap of information for researchers who rely on these qualities as a way of knowing. On the other hand, similar gaps occur in more traditional research and interaction environments but are generally considered to be more a problem of interpretive clarity than a natural condition of doing research with unfamiliar participants. (National Fraud Investigation Center and Trans Union, 1995)

Anonymity is the quality of being unknown or unacknowledged. In the digital age, primarily among Internet users, anonymity is perceived as a right, even as a necessity for the preservation of free speech. There have always been writers and artists who have published anonymously. Scribes using the pseudonym “Publius” wrote and published The Federalist papers, on which the U.S. Constitution was patterned. But on the Internet, the first medium to place publishing in the hands of almost ...