What is it about?
Anonymous social media platforms comprise sprawling publics where users, untethered from their legal identity, interact with other anonymous users to share and read user-generated content. The emergence of mobile applications that promise anonymity as a primary feature has led to new forms of social interaction and identity that have so far been understudied. To address these issues, I have drawn from 12 semi-structured interviews of undergraduate and graduate students at Queen’s University who were avid users of Yik Yak to explore the sociology of anonymity, surveillance, and identity. The findings reveal the wide diversity of cultural norms, social identities, and anonymous practices that are possible when people interact without their legal identities.
Featured Image
Photo by Yousef Espanioly on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This article is an empirical and theoretical attempt to understand the ways in which anonymous social media have altered the social interaction through anonymous digital acts over anonymous social media platforms. I do this through two main assertions: first, that practices of anonymity mediated through a social media platform comprise discrete acts of identity due to a process of dissociability, and second, that those dissociated acts become undisciplined.
Perspectives
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Undisciplined Performativity: A Sociological Approach to Anonymity, Social Media + Society, January 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2056305119829843.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page