Sunday, October 29, 2006

The perils of anonymity

The chief advantage of online anonymity is the ability to speak without being known. This is also the chief disadvantage.

Say you've been reading an academic blog off and on for a while and you've grown to enjoy and appreciate the blogger, inasmuch as it is possible to appreciate someone whose name you don't know. You may know a lot about the blogger, including names of pets or cars and attitudes toward both students and supervisors, but that one key piece of information is always withheld.

Then suppose one day that blog just disappears with no forwarding address.

There could be plenty of reasons for the disappearance: technical difficulties, head lice, high dudgeon, incarceration, chemotherapy, or a sudden desire for a whole-life makeover. But you'll never know, will you? Without a name, you can't even track the person down without devoting a lot of time and energy and technological know-how that you never got around to developing because of all the time you've spent building up your tenure file, and then if by some freak of nature you did manage to track the person down, what would you say? "Um, you don't know me but I've been reading your blog and I've been wondering: you know that job situation you were talking about? How did that ever turn out, anyway? None of my business, of course, but what ever happened with that head lice infestation?"

No, that blogger has become yet another story you'll never know the end of.

That's the problem with anonymity: it's too easy for individuals to fade out of the community. If this is, indeed, a community. It's tempting to think of the blogosphere as a sort of amorphous online community of compulsive communicators, but it's more like an twelve-step group in which individuals are represented by shape-shifting puppets. When a puppet disappears, what can the community do? Laugh, mourn, move on? It's impossible to know.

The solution, of course, is simple: eliminate anonymity. Name names. Reveal faces.

You first.

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