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April 11, 2005

(Lack of) Anonymity and Perplexion in the Blogsphere

Today I am confused; I may even be approaching worried. I have recently started reading a number of academic blogs. More specifically, I have been connecting with blogs by tenure-track or recently tenured women academics and am noticing a currious phonemenon: most of them are written anonymously. In Favor of Thinking's 31 Flavors of Guilt is the particular impetous for my perplexion. Is anonymity a tenure issue? That is to say, does blog anonymity provide some sort of protection in the tenure and promotion process whilst still allowing authors to make connections in the blogsphere they find useful? Is it a security issue? That is, is it somehow unsafe to attach one's real name to thoughts published on the web? And if so, why are pseudonyms more useful in the blogsphere than in say, the traditional publishing world (would any of us use our blog persona as author of our refereed papers or our first book)? Is it a citizenship issue? I'm going on a strong linguistic hunch that the flavors [sic] of In Favor [sic] of Thinking's guilt are quite (though by no means exclusively) American in origin. As a Canadian, do I live with some sort of nostalgia (I am reminded here of the fantastic treatment I receive when travelling abroad - en Normandie, par exemple) that renders me naive or innocent or arrogant in declaring my personhood? Perhaps it is an issue of the guilt to which IFT refers, writing, "But telling it to the world? isn't that just arrogance of the worst kind?" Perhaps I should really be just a tad more humble.

My intent here is not to bond by complaining. Rather, echoing back to the Sisters of Glory, I look to spread "Good News in Hard Times". So, congratulations IFT, on the paper at the Super Big Deal conference, on the footnotes, and on the will to write, in whatever forms of authorship seem to suit.

I guess the real question I'm posing is, why not be anonymous? What might I be risking or gaining by signing my name? Am I still protected by my non-faculty, academic staff member status (quite an irony, really, given all the talk of academic freedom that floats around my own university)? Perhaps. Or maybe in a world where networks risk turning into nets tout court, the power of being human is what's in a name. Lace.

Posted by lace at April 11, 2005 02:23 PM

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Comments

Hi Lace -- These are good questions that come up often. Last July there was a lot of discussion around the question of pseuonyms (see http://infavorofthinking.blogspot.com/2004_07_18_infavorofthinking_archive.html and http://infavorofthinking.blogspot.com/2004_07_25_infavorofthinking_archive.html for some comments and links to other blogs).
People have very different reasons for blogging, and some of that is reflected in the choice of name vs pseudonym. For me, personally, it was about creating a space where I can talk about academia, but that is separate from my actual job. Most importantly, if my students or colleagues google me, they arrive at only my professional sites, not my blog. I wanted that freedom. But there are other bloggers who choose to write under their own name: Little Professor, Scrivenings, Chutry Experiment, and others.

Posted by: Mel at April 12, 2005 12:12 AM

For me, it's like the old Dragnet line - names have been changed to protect the innocent. As a dean, I'm enough of a public figure on campus that, if folks here knew what I was posting, they'd quickly figure out who everybody is. Some of the stories would embarrass faculty or colleagues, which isn't my intention. I don't trust everybody to catch irony -- we Americans aren't especially good at that. :-)

Posted by: Dean Dad at April 12, 2005 07:57 AM

Thank you Mel and Dean Dad for your informative comments. Mel, I appreciate the links. I read yours as well as followed more, and found the arguments in favour of anonymity compelling. I continue to be intrigued as I think about possible implications of nationalism as a producing discourse in/of both the academy and academic blogs.

As for my own decisions around authorship, my hunch for today is that whatever (multiple, shifting) identities we use when we blog, there is both risk and promise in the writing/righting (where both writing and righting are temporal, to be sure). Thanks for reading & writing. L:)

Posted by: Lace at April 12, 2005 01:30 PM

TO BE OR NOT TO BE ANONYMOUS: Even if we write a personal journal and hide it under the bed, our anonymity is assured only if we burn it as we write each word, and hide only the ashes (assuming forensic exams won't be able to reconstruct our notes from the ash).

Noone among us is guaranteed to live out the nite, or entirely certain of who will 'clean out our house', so may as well post straight to the internet and save the 'anony' debate entirely.

Posted by: rgay at April 13, 2005 08:59 AM

Came across your blog while doing a vanity Google search, and I'll add that I've struggled with these questions in the past, deciding that I preferred to publish under my own name but that it would certainly constrain what I say. As a rseult, my blog has become a semi-professional place but one where I've been able to make some great connections. In fact, I've been invited to 2-3 conferences as a direct result of my blog. Another cool result is that students have Googled me and found my blog, which has sometimes led to some cool conversations, especially when a student from India found my review of a Bollywood film.

Posted by: Chuck at April 17, 2005 03:26 PM