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Use this page to brainstorm all the pieces of the research we might need for our study of anonymity.
History of anonymity (ancients, as well as anonymity in US history)
1930 "The Cult of Anonymity" Article in the Nation:"It gives an account of a contemporary group of unidentified writers in Paris who were withhold ing their names from their published productions in an effort "to curb the exploitation of personalities, and to establish 'the art as an ideal, not the ego.'"11 While the noun here is attached to writings actually printed without name, its looser meaning almost as an antonym for personality smoothed the way for its use elsewhere for written pieces in fact signed by the author but exhibiting the impersonality associated with anonymity by removing the poet, so to speak, from the poem" - from Anne Ferry
Lowenfels and Fraenkel believed that men who understood the disintegration of the modern world to be a stubborn fact should be anonymous as writers, undifferentiated from an audience whose death they shared. The days of personal authorship were over. The best the writer could hope for was creative suicide: anonymity. They had collaborated on a 29 page pamphlet arguing the point, titled Anonymous: The need for anonymity (1930): "The Anonymous struggle to project the completed novel, or poem, becomes the struggle for a world ideal, creation; not the advancement of any one poet's standing, or recongnition'...If he is an artist, that is enough."
Jay martin
Always Merry And Bright (Biography of Henry Miller)
The Ultimate Paradox: anonymity as an aesthetic ideal and as a cultural condition.
Anonymity as Aesthetic Ideal (and perhaps moral ideal as well)
1925: E. M. Forster puts his name on the title page under the calculatedly impersonal title Anonymity: An Enquiry, which makes the essay sound like a disinterested investigation of a public issue. It is not that, but an urgently felt argument for a return to the literary past when "writers and readers . . . did not make a cult of expression as we do to day. (also see TS Eliot)
Anonymity as Anomie - The Crisis of Significance
"In an article by the literary journalist Henry Seidel Canby in 1926 titled "Anon is Dead," both anonymous and anonymity are key words in the explanation he proposed for the phenomenon discussed earlier: that in the twentieth century works of literature rarely appear in print unsigned, while before 1850 there were as many important books of all sorts first printed anonymously as with the writer's name attached. The blame for this historical change is not to be laid to the "vanity" of authors, but to the longing for "escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life," which generates the "passion for nonanonymity" in the "general man who feels his personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization." As a consequence, this "general man" longs for "vicarious experience" to be found in the intimate writings of "rich, glaring personalities" whose well publicized names become legendary.14 In the language of the article, anonymity has become, in effect, a new word with a new frame of reference. It is associated with "City living" which is "essentially impersonal," but also with "standardized" feelings, with "science" and its "laws that. . . ignore individuality completely, with all that to the writer constituted "mass civilization."" - Quoted from Anne Ferry
"A brief catalogue of examples of very different writings confirms Raymond Williams's observation that "a common structure of feeling was being formed," which in the twentieth century came to be gathered in the noun anonymity." (Anne Ferry)
"In the new cities . . . the old warm attachments, born of ancient, local contiguity and personal intercourse, vanished in the fierce contest for wealth among thousands who had never seen each other's faces before." _ Arnold Toynbee 1881
Include History of "Whatever" and "Meh"
Brief History of CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication) in relation to Anonymity
See Rheingold 1993 Virtual Communities, Turkle 1995, etc.
(in part it can be seen as a response to crisis of significance and overall feeling of disconnection. In another way, it can be seen to extend the problem)
The Age of Microcelebrity (Read de Zengotita's Mediated)
"Fans, in their anonymity, got more and more restless. Celebrities held a monopoly on the most precious scarce resource in an increasingly mediated society. Attention. They were gorging on it. For spectators, the most basic of specifically human needs - the need for acknowledgment, for significance - was left unsatisfied. ... They are already performing their lives ... Now they want to be recognized ... All that was lacking was the means. Until recently. Now the representational spaces have been technologically magnified ... That's the condition that allows the virtual revolution to take place. But spectators were primed for it, motivated to undertake what the technology only made possible."
"Robert Murphy, who introduced me to anthropology at Columbia lo these many years ago, used to sum up the difference between modern societies and the small-scale hunter-gatherer communities in which human nature took shape in this way: "everyone is famous in a tribe." He meant us to understand that, for human beings, the need to be recognized is almost as basic as food. The force behind the virtual revolution is primordial." - de Zengotita 116-117
text from an anonymous website posted after an anonymous / Patriotic Nigras attack on Second Life:
"As the internet has grown in popularity, a disturbing phenomenon has occurred: Everyone thinks they they are SPECIAL. We have news for you... You aren't special. You are a mindless horde of filth, traversing the universe on a small ball of dirt. A speck upon a speck in the vastness of existance. We are here to remind you of this. We will take all of the filth in the world; images you never want to see, stories you never want to hear, memories you never want to see again, we will bring it all into the light of day and laugh at it as you run screaming, We cannot be stopped. We have no leader. We have no true names. We are Anonymous, and our numbers are vast. We are everywhere, and we never forgive. Wherever someone takes themselves too seriously, we will be there. Wherever someone has an inflated ego, we will be there. We will do it through madness. And we will remove you from the high place you have built yourself." See also YouTube Watchdog
History of Anonymous (4chan, /b/, etc.)
History of anonymity (ancients, as well as anonymity in US history)
1930 "The Cult of Anonymity" Article in the Nation:"It gives an account of a contemporary group of unidentified writers in Paris who were withhold ing their names from their published productions in an effort "to curb the exploitation of personalities, and to establish 'the art as an ideal, not the ego.'"11 While the noun here is attached to writings actually printed without name, its looser meaning almost as an antonym for personality smoothed the way for its use elsewhere for written pieces in fact signed by the author but exhibiting the impersonality associated with anonymity by removing the poet, so to speak, from the poem" - from Anne Ferry
Lowenfels and Fraenkel believed that men who understood the disintegration of the modern world to be a stubborn fact should be anonymous as writers, undifferentiated from an audience whose death they shared. The days of personal authorship were over. The best the writer could hope for was creative suicide: anonymity. They had collaborated on a 29 page pamphlet arguing the point, titled Anonymous: The need for anonymity (1930): "The Anonymous struggle to project the completed novel, or poem, becomes the struggle for a world ideal, creation; not the advancement of any one poet's standing, or recongnition'...If he is an artist, that is enough."
Jay martin
Always Merry And Bright (Biography of Henry Miller)
The Ultimate Paradox: anonymity as an aesthetic ideal and as a cultural condition.
Anonymity as Aesthetic Ideal (and perhaps moral ideal as well)
1925: E. M. Forster puts his name on the title page under the calculatedly impersonal title Anonymity: An Enquiry, which makes the essay sound like a disinterested investigation of a public issue. It is not that, but an urgently felt argument for a return to the literary past when "writers and readers . . . did not make a cult of expression as we do to day. (also see TS Eliot)
Anonymity as Anomie - The Crisis of Significance
"In an article by the literary journalist Henry Seidel Canby in 1926 titled "Anon is Dead," both anonymous and anonymity are key words in the explanation he proposed for the phenomenon discussed earlier: that in the twentieth century works of literature rarely appear in print unsigned, while before 1850 there were as many important books of all sorts first printed anonymously as with the writer's name attached. The blame for this historical change is not to be laid to the "vanity" of authors, but to the longing for "escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life," which generates the "passion for nonanonymity" in the "general man who feels his personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization." As a consequence, this "general man" longs for "vicarious experience" to be found in the intimate writings of "rich, glaring personalities" whose well publicized names become legendary.14 In the language of the article, anonymity has become, in effect, a new word with a new frame of reference. It is associated with "City living" which is "essentially impersonal," but also with "standardized" feelings, with "science" and its "laws that. . . ignore individuality completely, with all that to the writer constituted "mass civilization."" - Quoted from Anne Ferry
"A brief catalogue of examples of very different writings confirms Raymond Williams's observation that "a common structure of feeling was being formed," which in the twentieth century came to be gathered in the noun anonymity." (Anne Ferry)
"In the new cities . . . the old warm attachments, born of ancient, local contiguity and personal intercourse, vanished in the fierce contest for wealth among thousands who had never seen each other's faces before." _ Arnold Toynbee 1881
Include History of "Whatever" and "Meh"
Brief History of CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication) in relation to Anonymity
See Rheingold 1993 Virtual Communities, Turkle 1995, etc.
(in part it can be seen as a response to crisis of significance and overall feeling of disconnection. In another way, it can be seen to extend the problem)
The Age of Microcelebrity (Read de Zengotita's Mediated)
"Fans, in their anonymity, got more and more restless. Celebrities held a monopoly on the most precious scarce resource in an increasingly mediated society. Attention. They were gorging on it. For spectators, the most basic of specifically human needs - the need for acknowledgment, for significance - was left unsatisfied. ... They are already performing their lives ... Now they want to be recognized ... All that was lacking was the means. Until recently. Now the representational spaces have been technologically magnified ... That's the condition that allows the virtual revolution to take place. But spectators were primed for it, motivated to undertake what the technology only made possible."
"Robert Murphy, who introduced me to anthropology at Columbia lo these many years ago, used to sum up the difference between modern societies and the small-scale hunter-gatherer communities in which human nature took shape in this way: "everyone is famous in a tribe." He meant us to understand that, for human beings, the need to be recognized is almost as basic as food. The force behind the virtual revolution is primordial." - de Zengotita 116-117
text from an anonymous website posted after an anonymous / Patriotic Nigras attack on Second Life:
"As the internet has grown in popularity, a disturbing phenomenon has occurred: Everyone thinks they they are SPECIAL. We have news for you... You aren't special. You are a mindless horde of filth, traversing the universe on a small ball of dirt. A speck upon a speck in the vastness of existance. We are here to remind you of this. We will take all of the filth in the world; images you never want to see, stories you never want to hear, memories you never want to see again, we will bring it all into the light of day and laugh at it as you run screaming, We cannot be stopped. We have no leader. We have no true names. We are Anonymous, and our numbers are vast. We are everywhere, and we never forgive. Wherever someone takes themselves too seriously, we will be there. Wherever someone has an inflated ego, we will be there. We will do it through madness. And we will remove you from the high place you have built yourself." See also YouTube Watchdog
History of Anonymous (4chan, /b/, etc.)
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