anonymusings

Although Professor Orlando Figes used anonymity to publish caustic reviews of his peers online, anonymity and the right to sue for libel must be protected, writes Katie Engelhart.

[Note: this post originally appeared on www.freespeechdebate.com, a project of Oxford University.]

The case

Anonymity = cowardice? = half-way to heroism?

Former Israeli soldiers disclose routine mistreatment of Palestinian children. (via The Guardian). “Most of the soldiers have given testimonies anonymously.”

FromThe New York Times:

South Korean Court Rejects Online Name Verification Law

“SEOUL, South Korea — In a major victory for free speech activists in South Korea, a top court on Thursday ruled unconstitutional a law that required Internet users to verify their identity before posting comments on major local Web sites. […]

The regulation was adopted amid widespread concern that Internet users were deluging Web sites with malicious and defamatory comments and false rumors; in a few cases, such statements were blamed in the suicides of celebrities.

But free-speech advocates condemned the rule, arguing that the government was using perceived abuses as a convenient excuse to discourage political criticism. They feared that people would censor themselves rather than provide their names, which would make it easier for the government to find and possibly punish them.”

Some points to note here:

Unlike the real-name debate in Germany (see below), the South Korean discussion was focused narrowly on libel. German officials worry about criminals using anonymity to shield their nefarious criminal activities. In South Korea, the primary target of the proposed real-name policy seems to have been the ordinary web user who hides behind anonymity to launch slanderous verbal attacks.

Also interesting is the strategy taken by the opponents: the free speech activists. Their main grievance here was not that government was censoring web users - but rather that government policies would encourage self-censorship.

The issue of self-censorship is also on the table in Myanmar, where the regime just ended direct media censorship.

If Germany’s especially-litigious Pirate Party has its way, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) will soon be forced to rule on whether anonymity is a human right - or, more specifically, part of the right to private life enshrined under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Reuters reports:

“This latest suit follows a February ruling by Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court that it was constitutional for telecommunication providers to demand personal data to set up accounts.

Some European Union countries such as Germany, Denmark, and France, have outlawed anonymous pre-paid cards to prevent their use in criminal activities, but the Pirate Party says that stifles a citizen’s right to privacy and free speech.”

I’m no linguist. Yet it occurs to me that our discussion of anonymity might benefit from a little phonological injection.

The noun “anonymous” comes from the Greek anonymos, or “without name.”

But—as the literary scholar Anne Ferry recounts far more thoroughly than I—the English adjective itself was only born in the late 16th century. Then, and for centuries, the word was used sparingly. And its meaning was limited: used to describe a nameless piece of writing or an unnamed author.

It was only in the twentieth century that we got the corresponding noun: “anonymity.”

Linguists will point out that adjectival nouns—like nouns formed by slapping the suffix ity onto an adjective—are special beasts. Ferry writes that the seemingly humdrum acquisition of an ity can be the marking of much broader cultural shifts:

“… when such nouns are formed, something new in the language “has come into existence which did not exist before”… These nouns, then, can be powerfully compact signals of cultural changes… Like vast numbers of other words englished in the sixteenth century, anonymous was imported to serve a newly felt need.”

That need was to establish authorship concretely, where before the presence/absence of a named author was inconsequential. Importantly, this took place amidst a boom in the publication of anonymous poetry volumes in Europe.

But to be sure, the 20th century lexical shift—adjective —> noun—also spurred a substantive one. The meaning of the words loosened.  “Anonymous” and “anonymity” spread from the confines of authorship to the fluffier domain of identity.

Here’s where our next discussion will take off.

“Matisyahu Revels in Anonymity Without Signature Beard” via Rolling Stone.

Analog move…

In 1930, The Nation magazine ran an article entitled “The Cult of Anonymity.” The piece followed a small group of Parisian writers who had pledged to publish their work without names: “to curb the exploitation of personalities” and to establish “the art as an ideal, not the ego.” A few years earlier, the British novelist E.M Forster’s pamphlet “Anonymity: An Enquiry” had lashed out a professional authors’ “insistence on personality,” and called for a return to a past when anonymity was celebrated. Almost forty years later, French philosophers rekindled the debate. In 1969, Michel Foucault asked, “What is an Author?” His more bombastic contemporary, Roland Barthes, proclaimed the named author dead on arrival.

It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.

Up through the 17th century, authoring books was a less-than-classy enterprise. A published novel? How uncouth! For that reason, many works were published anonymously or pseudonymously. But for me, what is more interesting is that these books were printed, purchased, read and critically reviewed—even though readers had no information about the works’ provenance. In other words, anonymity did not negate credibility. Authorship was not a condition for authority.

The (very few) historians working in this area speak of a “transformation of readers’ expectations” around 1800: some time shortly after the French Revolution, when the modern publishing industry was in its infancy. By 1850, books needed authors. They still do. And it is this that our French philosophes were reacting against. If anonymity was obsolete by the 19th century, it was remembered with nostalgia in the 20th.

What of now? Once again, the publishing industry is transforming. And we seem torn: insistent on an elusive right to express ourselves anonymously, even as we bask in the heydays of the “age of personality.” Anonymous ‘mommy bloggers’ get cult followings. But I tend to scrutinize the Wikipedia bios of journalists before I make a judgment on their work.

Identity matters, and it doesn’t. What is sure is that our obsession with provenance—our tendency to ingest an author and his/her words hand in hand—is a relatively new invention. And one I’ll continue to explore.

“Today authorship and authority have become inextricably linked, and literature without a responsible agent identified is like an artifact that turns up in the saleroom lacking a decent provenance. Both anonymity and pseudonymity have become suspect behavior.” - Pat Rogers, New Literary History 33.2 (2002)