Two meta-blogging posts in a week! It must be the summer silly season.
One of the easily distributed pieces of wisdom in last week's discussions of the Ivan Tribble article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the more titillating story of how a New York journalist fired her nanny after reading her blog (well discussed on bitchphd) was this: blog pseudonymously, or blog anonymously.
Now, I could well have chosen to blog anonymously by using blogspot or typepad, or whatever, but I had few qualms about putting my name, face and opinions out in public. I also like to kid myself that other aspects of my CV will outweigh any hiring committee member who objects to my opinions about tipping, American football, and sweaty Mormons.
The most basic and unoriginal point is that pseudonymous and anonymous are not the same thing. Most all blogs that are anonymous are pseudonymous when referring to people and places, but remaining anonymous takes real skill.
Indeed might it be better to blog under your own name and think carefully about what you put out there—don't complain about colleagues or friends, don't express shrill political opinions, etc... —than to blog pseudonymously, say things that might well offend people, and be found out.
Many pseudonymous bloggers mention enough real details about their life that they very quickly reduce the set of people that anyone determined to unmask them has to examine. For example, when people give pretty fine detail about their job, even in the United States, you quickly narrow the field of possible blog writers down to a small number. Combine that with information about where someone is living and we really are talking about pretty small numbers.
Do pseudonymous bloggers take great care to anonymize any email with people who leave comments on their blog? I ask, because this, in part, was how some determined people worked out who Atrios was. They received some email that came from the library servers at the main line colleges in Philadelphia, put that together with Atrios' informed comment about economics, and began to suspect it was an adjunct professor of economics. And so he was.
Do pseudonymous bloggers who wish to remain anonymous keep their blogs free of photos? Put some photos in there, especially if it's of your haircut, or your hometown, and you're well on the way to providing someone with more evidence of who you might be.
I say this not to criticize pseudonymous bloggers for these posts about their jobs, and the photos of their haircuts, which I have enjoyed reading. The question really is, does putting something on the internet pseudonymously entitle you to anonymity? Is anonymity what people with pseudonyms actually want?
If I wanted to find out who profgrrrl was, could I? Perhaps, with some effort, and focussed googling. For the record, I'm not about to try. Could I find out who BitchPhD was? With a lot more difficulty. Not going to try that one either. Would it be weird? Yes. Would it be unethical? Hmmmm ... And there's the rub.
If you publish something on the internet, are you entitled to remain anonymous? I think back to the pseudonymous pamphleteers of the American revolution, who actually risked real physical violence for their views, and think that remaining anonymous is justified. There are also, of course, contemporary pseudonymous bloggers in such places as Iraq, China, and Zimbabwe who risk real violence for their expression too. I speak not of these blogs, but the pseudonymous blogs that have proliferated in politically free countries. The cost of being unmasked for most is embarrassment or job dismissal.
But there's also the established tradition of the pseudonym as parlour game, where the readership is encouraged to take some initiative and find out who wrote that. Who knows how your audience is going to react to your cloaking?
There's also the question, if you're truly, truly uncomfortable with being found out, why put your thoughts in an established, consistent place with a known—if alternate & pseudonymous—personality?
Some of the pseudonymous bloggers I read have argued that the linking between and commenting on pseudonymous blogs allows the creation of a supportive community. I have some sympathy for this view. One of the great things about the internet is how it allows people from diverse locations to come together around shared interests, and to choose the level of disclosure involved. I am less sure whether blogs, even pseudonymous ones, are the appropriate venue for those discussions.
Many message boards are anonymous, and provide much of the same support and community, without the investment in an identity and personality that a blog requires.
Obviously, it's for everyone to set their own boundaries for themselves about what is and isn't public. But I do think that the right to anonymity on a blog are less than on an anonymous message board, and certainly less than in a privately kept diary. Having kept a diary for two decades now (that clause made me realise how old I am), I'm all for the self-awareness [and self-delusion] that comes through writing. But I do think that much of that should
stay hidden from public view.
I used to include a regular amount of political and cultural musings in my diary—possibly a sign I wasn't getting out enough—but have largely transferred those to the blog now. Public place. Public comments. In my view.
When I started this entry, my idea that pseudonymous blogs were not as anonymous as all that was just an idea. This morning I was searching for reviews of a hotel that I'm planning to stay at on a trip later this year, and came across a blog entry from someone who had stayed there. The anecdotes she related sounded eerily familiar to those a friend—who I knew had stayed there—had told me. So I clicked through to the front page, and saw that, sure enough, this was the blog of a friend-of-a-friend (who I've never met, but have heard of).
In this blog, people's names had been replaced by a series of consistent pseudonyms. But the names of cities and activities and events were there. Just a couple of mentions from my friend about this other friend, were enough to make me think "this has to be X, my friend Y's friend." And so it was. And I've only heard about "X" twice.
In this instance nothing too bad will come of my idle "research" and stumbling upon the blog entry. But if it's easy enough for me to guess this person's identity when I've never met them, when they use pseudonyms for all people, I think it would be very easy for others who know the person to guess that too.
The use of proper names for places and activities was helpful, to be sure, but I note that some pseudonymous bloggers who are seemingly careful not to reveal the name of their hometown do not provide pseudonyms for places they travel too. Others do.
People who know you closely enough in real life might well be able to identify you even if you used pseudonyms for nearly everything you did. If you tell the truth about the relationship between people and events, that can easily be enough for people to work out who you are.
In the end this is a continuing debate, and I have no pithy answer to the questions I've littered along the path. But I would say this: most all of us know how to be polite, how to think about how others might hear us, it's something we've been learning since we were really young; not a lot of us know how to make writing pseudonymous enough to be anonymous, it's not really taught so much in school or at home.
Posted by robe0419 at July 22, 2005 5:19 PM