Accountability in the Dark: Accusations and the Development of Anonymous Idiocultures

• In Event: Research in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: Categories and Identities in Interaction I

Abstract

How do you make sense of what someone is doing if you cannot identify who they are? I draw on theories of dramaturgy and ethnomethodology (Goffman 1959, 1963; Garfinkel 1967) to extend work on accountability to radically anonymous environments. Radically anonymous conspiracy forums provide a useful limit case for studying social order because users are stripped of all identity markers, making it possible to observe what sense-making practices persist in the absence of contextual information. Once the “who” of interaction is removed, one can observe the “how” of accountability as participants work to make their own actions legible and interpret the disconnected actions of their anonymous fellows. Eventually, strategies for solving this fundamental problem aggregate into a group culture as participants’ adaptations to what they do not know about each other becomes a new basis for shared culture. Based on a digital ethnography of early QAnon, I show how participants accuse others of being enemy saboteurs in order to make ambiguous actions clear and provide a basis for interpretation. Ultimately, I argue that identification grows in importance when participants are anonymous, and that categorization can provide a kind of repair when other mechanisms are unavailable.

Author

• Jonathan Drake, University of Notre Dame