Undisciplined Performativity: A Sociological Approach to Anonymity

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 novel social configurations that have so far been understudied. This article is an empirical and theoretical attempt to understand the ways in which anonymous social media have altered the social through performative, digital acts mediated through a community of anonymous users. I do this through two main propositions: first, that practices of anonymity mediated through a social media platform comprise discrete performative acts of identity due to a process of dissociability, and second, that those dissociated performative acts become undisciplined. To address these propositions, 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 are discussed in relation to theories of performativity and discipline that have been commonly deployed in media and surveillance studies