Anonymity and Identity

As a category of fashion, masks have been worn in both secular and ritual circumstances across time and cultures. At the heart of masking is the concealment or obscuring of identity. Masks enable the wearer to occupy and enact alternative identities, perform without fear of reprisal and maintain anonymity. They are therefore useful tools to analyze human behavior. Yet while the mask is a pervasive feature within fashion and popular culture, it has, until recently, been largely unrecognised as an influence in fashioning identity today.

This paper will analyse the fashion mask, tracing its earliest uses in the sixteenth century through to its presence in contemporary fashion collections where its symbolic potential is embraced. A focus on specific examples will offer insight into fashion designers who have employed the mask as an instrument of fantasy and empowerment. Masking as seen in contexts such as in club culture and Mardi Gras will be evaluated to demonstrate how these grassroots activities have been adopted not only by fashion designers, but by popular culture icons such as Björk, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga within large-scale, mainstream performances. I conclude that the prevalence of the fashion mask is driven by contemporary shifts in identity politics, mirroring the motives of its earliest uses in fashion history.

This paper explores constructions of social identity in eighteenth‑century dialogues written by the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800). These three satirical dialogues are set in the Underworld between mythological figures and contemporary type characters, and they were included in Lord Lyttelton's anonymously published The Dialogues of the Dead (1760). Social identity constructions in these texts are analysed through stance-taking, specifically in terms of evaluation and the identification of social values. Montagu's satires are instructional and judgmental, and the social values advocated through the voices of her characters are assumed to represent the author's own social identity and the values of the bluestocking circle. Through her judgment of the empty lives of fashionable women, entertainment‑driven readers and the capitalist greed of the publishing industry, Montagu promotes the virtues of learning, morality, duty and self‑discipline. Social values function as identity markers of her moral and rational mind.

The anonymity of cyberspace enables people to express themselves more freely than in the physical world. Thus, when interacting with others online, some people choose to reconstruct a virtual identity that is partly or even totally different from their physical identity. Using the advanced self-discrepancy theory and the framework of psychological well-being, the current study theoretically modelled the expression of three domains of the self (the ought self, the ideal self and the negative true self) that affects the fulfilment of autonomy and self-acceptance, further influencing people's overall satisfaction in an anonymous online environment. The data (n = 837) were collected from QQ, an anonymous social networking platform from China. The results suggested that virtual identity reconstruction in the online world was significantly associated with the fulfilment of autonomy and self-acceptance. Additionally, autonomy and self-acceptance played important roles in shaping user satisfaction.

Keywords
Author Keywords:User satisfaction; identity reconstruction; self-acceptance; autonomy; anonymity

Zudilina N. V. Identity formation in the Internet-based communities. – Manuscript.
Candidate of Philosophy degree thesis in speciality 09.00.04 – philosophical anthropology, philosophy of culture. – Taurida National V. I. Vernadsky University. Simferopol, 2012.
The thesis is devoted to the study of identity formation in Internet-based communities. The topicality of the problem is conditioned upon growth of the role of cyberspace as the sphere of communication for different communities, participation in which influences the identity formation of users.
In this thesis an interdisciplinary model of identity is further developed; it is proposed the structural model of identity formation as the actualization of its primordial potential, and the model of the virtual projections of identity as a way of identity formation in cyberspace. Due to these models, it is shown that each man has only one identity, which manifests itself in multiple aspects in offline and online environments.
Key words: identity of man, identity formation of man, virtual projection of identity of man, Internet-based community, interactivity of Internet-based community, immersiveness of Internet-based community, anonymity of Internet-based community.

One of the most commonly used user authentication mechanisms is two factor authentication based on smart card and password. The core feature of the scheme is to enforce that the user must have the smart card and know the password in order to gain access to server. Recently, Liu et al. proposed a smart card based password authentication scheme and argued that it is secure against insider attack, replay attack and man in the middle attack and provides perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, we show security weaknesses in Liu et al.'s scheme focused on off-line password guessing attack and masquerading attack and it does not provide perfect forward secrecy and anonymity. Accordingly, we propose a privacy preserving user authentication scheme based on smart card, denoted as PUAS, to remedy these security weaknesses and to provide anonymity and perfect forward secrecy. PUAS is more secure with a bit of computational overhead to support several positive properties in security and privacy.

By analyzing the characteristics of contemporary avant-garde artistic practices that employ the street space of contemporary cities as their medium, this article theorizes that the current system of urban video surveillance transforms the visual parameters of the street, making it more transparent and permeable to the view. Thus, city streets lose the quality of anonymity that was originally described and interpreted by many 20th century sociologists and philosophers. The very disappearance of these unobservable zones creates the condition out of which avant-garde artists interest emerges in the search for inactive urban areas (“non-places”) that accumulate anonymity.