Since I remember, an anonymous message is associated with something dark, unworthy, perhaps threatening. Or, in the best case, with the way some find a complaint that involves risks. That is, it is sent to put something … evidence, but hiding identity by caution or cowardice. In any case, it is not something we see with good eyes.
That is why I wonder why they allow it in networks, if from the masking you can kill, end up with others, sow panic and assault in so many ways that even suicide can be one of the consequences.
Opinar demands temper, clarity and argumentative capacity, whether we are sitting with friends, and speaking in a classroom or in front of the computer, as we do writers and journalists. What we do when we think in public is to face, exposing us to aggressive responses, insults, and in certain places, unfortunately, to death itself.
This is the reason that some argue to justify anonymity: that in dictatorial regimes it is the only way to participate safely in the collective dialogue. But the price paid by society is very high.
Those who show their hyperbolic self on Facebook, are the same as they camouflage when it comes to opinion or assault
In his important book ‘Left is not Woke’, Susan Neiman cites Mary Midgley: “Moral changes are, perhaps more than any other, changes in the type of things that people are ashamed.” Neiman brings an example: today, say what they say in private, very few are those who dare to make sexist or racist jokes or laugh at them. They are ashamed. And later he adds: “If the Internet can serve as a sink, it is because of the simple fact that it allows attacks to be anonymous.” According to her, anonymity allows the world to be shouting what the face would embarrass.
That is a possible reason. But Lacan said that if something has changed in today’s world, there is no longer ashamed, which would be the reverse of what Neiman says. I would think that today the victim is ashamed than the perpetrator. Even a public scandal can give revenues to the one exposed.
As Beatriz Sarlo wrote, “the scandal scriptwriters are their same protagonists.” Because intimacy also changed, giving rise to incoherences. The same that show their hyperbolic self on Facebook, exhibiting their happiness and even their sexuality, are the same as they camouflage when it comes to commenting or assaulting.
And one more contradiction: in one of our lives we can act anonymously, although we are part of the surveillance society, in which we are more than identified by large technology companies and we are manipulated by them through the algorithms, that reveal everything of our identities.
Neiman’s conclusion has to do with the ethical problem that anonymity truly raises: «… the fear of shame should be in itself shameful, something that torments us in adolescence but that must be left behind. How many times do we behave like the subjects of the emperor and we are too cowardly to point out his nakedness? Maybe it is that cowardice has long ashamed.
#Piedad #Bonnett #anonymity #shame #cynicism #cowardice
