  Creating anonymity means cutting connections. A common goal in this context
is to prevent accountability. This prevention of accountability can be
problematic, for example, if it leads to delinquents remaining undetected.
However, imputability can also provide protection against discrimination. In
medical, religious or legal matters, this is of fundamental importance. Thus,
when individuals actively establish anonymity, they do so mostly because they
want to prevent certain information about them, that is, sensitive and/or
compromising information, from being associated with their identities. By
remaining inaccessible as individuals with respect to certain information about
them, they can engage in forms of exchange that would otherwise be impossible
for them. Examples include practices of exchange in (self-organized) therapy
groups, acting out stigmatized sexual preferences, the role of anonymity in the
performing arts, or political resistance movements. Given the variety of
examples in which personal anonymity is important, it is not surprising that it
is primarily these personal dimensions that are the focus of current debates
about the increasing precariousness of anonymity in the face of new technical
possibilities of data mining and processing. In this paper, we nevertheless -
or precisely because of this - want to focus on another aspect of anonymity
that has received much less attention so far. Namely, we assume that
researching and working with and about anonymity can open up new perspectives
on and for contemporary forms of knowledge production.
