Anonymity: A Hidden Danger
Imagine there was a button you could press that would instantly deposit ten million dollars into your bank account, at the expense of single a human life. Would you press it? What if the victim was someone that you didn’t know or a person from another country? The 2009 movie “The Box” poses this interesting question. Even if you wouldn’t choose to press the button, the concept of namelessness still hold a powerful weight. The condition of anonymity limits the compassion we feel for others, the consequences we face for our actions, and the way we understand ourselves. In Tom Vanderbilt’s essay “Shut Up, I Can’t Hear You” he explores the positive and negative consequences of anonymity. On one hand, being nameless creates the “online disinhibition effect” (491). In a community of strangers, each opinion matters as much as the last. Anonymity breeds equality between all social classes and awards validity to all ideas in themselves, regardless of who put them forth. The downside of this, As Vanderbilt Points out, is that by removing social distinctions, we also remove behavioral obligations. Who cares if you hurt Juicyfruit317’s feelings? When each person is as important as the next, there is “little…show more content… Philip Zimbardo’s “The Lucifer Effect” analyses and compares the Stanford prison experiment, a study on the psychology of imprisonment that ultimately resulted in psychological torture, and the events at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where the C.I.A. detained and tortured prisoners. Zimbardo revealed that in his own study, the uniforms that the prison guards wore created a sense of anonymity that shielded their identity from the prisoners that they were torturing. The same held true for the uniforms the inmates wore. The fact that they knew nothing about the inmates, allowed the prison guards to strip them of their humanity and commit atrocities they would have never considered
