Online Anonymity

[koganbot]

Strange post by hilzoy at Obsidian Wings where she says she'd always imagined that by posting under "hilzoy" she was indicating to her readers that that's how she'd like to be known on blogs, as opposed to being referred to by her real name. She gets a bit pissy at Slate for publishing her actual identity.*

Anyway, the strangeness isn't that she wants her blog identity to remain disconnected from her identity offline (though I wonder what right she thinks she has to anonymity if she's going to blog about stuff that's related to what she gets paid to teach and write about), but rather her assuming that her readers would take her use of a screen name as a signal that she's suppressing her real name and wants everyone to go along. That seems pretty naive, and also misunderstands Web practice - unless it's my corner of the Web that's strange. Nearly all the people I run into online post under screen names when they're on message boards or blogs, and I doubt that more than a few of them are doing so to conceal their offline identities. Rather, they're expressing themselves, just as they would by having more than one icon or by wearing different-colored socks on different days. Actually, using one's full name seems a bit odd, like referring to oneself as "Mister" while everyone else is using nicknames: the reasons I used my real name on ilX from the get-go are that I wanted to be better known and that there'd be a conflict of interest in my posting about music and rock criticism and other rock critics while concealing who I am. But as I said, most people who use screen names in my online worlds aren't doing so to suppress their identities. I often know their real names, and where I don't I could probably find out easily enough.

Yesterday I read Andrew Rosenthal in the NY Times saying "When I'm scanning comments (and I scan the comments on every Opinion section article that offers comment), I tend to read the ones with names attached and ignore the ones with screen names. I have a lot of interest in what John Krouskoff of New City has to say, and really none in what spatula187 (to make up one printable screen name) has to say." I realize there's a difference in posting at a high-profile place like the Times or YouTube or People etc. and posting on poptimists, but my guess is still that most of the people who use screen names at those places are doing so out of the expressive habit, not for the anonymity (though no doubt some probably feel freer to act like douchebags than they would if they were using their real names).

*Of course, if you become better-known under your blog name, perhaps you're suppressing your actual identity when you use your given name.

Comments

[koganbot]

Gah! Now I've read some of the backstory and there's too much of it and I'm not going to read further. But for what it's worth I don't think there's any clear online etiquette any more than there's clear offline etiquette. Relationships and situations develop their own conventions, though not from scratch (there's a family resemblance to previous relationships and situations); often all parties "get" the habits and conventions without anyone stating them or without the conventions being statable or fixed [think of paradigms here!], sometimes they don't, and sometimes when there are fights one party or another will get all upset because someone is breaking unspoken "agreements." Happens plenty of times in romance.

In any event, there are two things at issue here. (1) Does someone's posting under a screen name send a signal that the person doesn't want those posts to be associated with her real name? The answer is, um, depends on the situation and the community, etc. - though it often sends a signal that the person might want those posts disassociated from her real name. (Which I think is what you're saying above.) (2) Is it a violation to reveal someone's real name if she doesn't want us to? Well, that's a judgment call, again depending on the circumstances. I would generally follow someone's wishes unless I felt I had a good reason not to, but that doesn't mean that someone should expect me to, especially if she doesn't know me well and we're among millions of people bobbing around in an online world. And also, what constitutes a good reason?

I think hilzoy may be trying to do the impossible: be a public intellectual under two different names while not wanting the two names associated (or at least without wanting her activities as hilzoy to screw up her interaction with her students). And if she chooses to dispute with people in public, I don't think she gets to tell them how to identify her or tell them to limit their responses to addressing the activities of only one of her personas at a time. So I think Linda Hirshman was within her rights. And the issue here isn't simply the one between old media and new. (That doesn't mean I'd have done what Hirshman did or that I quite get her rationale. But as I've said, there seems to be more backstory than I'm ever going to pay attention to.) Also, what I've just said is hilzoy-specific, not Internet general.

(The thing I worry about in addressing you and Tom isn't how to refer to you but just that my initial responses to your posts tend to be with where I disagree. I think you two are pretty good at letting stuff roll off your back, but sometimes I worry that I don't know my own strength.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think yr right that hilzoy response demonstrated naivety: i think there is a diff between the way the various interlocking internet communitiers wd treat this issue -- cf jesurgislac's responses -- and how a journaist unhip to the net will treat it BUT i think hilzoy is pampered that she didn't think this thru long ago -- she has CONSIDERABLE off-net pedigree (i own a book by her mum!) (which i have not really read) and there's no WAY this isn't catnip to a journalist

semi-related: in one of the recent crooked timber debates a regular long-time minor contributor unmasked himself unexpectedly, bcz the discussion unexpectedly referred to him -- "george sciabbala aka geo" -- which was (to me) as awesome and funny as the woody allen scene with mcluhan... geo had been commenting, not uninterestingly, forEVER as one of us nobodies, and suddenly stepped up and turned out to be the person the book was about...

[koganbot]

Well, I may be demonstrating naiveté myself in overlooking how much hilzoy might be in a difficult position as a blogger. She was wisely low-key in dealing with the utter schmuck who was trying to troll her and use her parents to invalidate her. (Hirshman on the other hand didn't bring up hilzoy's parents, just identified hilzoy by occupation and position.) One reason for her to blog under a pseudonym could be so that the prestige of her parents and grandparents isn't an issue. And both you and I hate the way papers and mags try to make the prestige and authority of what they cover adhere to the journal itself. But nonetheless, online or off, new media or old, I simply don't see where the community should be given the right to dictate to others that they have to suppress info on who I am. Or I do see where - see petronia's post below - but I don't see the "rule" as all-encompassing.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

that's a bit what i was getting at with "old-school media": i think journalists are trained -- should be trained -- to say "sorry, no can do, we're not friends, no conditions apply, i am the reader's servant, and this is something THEY want to know": this is where i think hilzoy's surprise is a bit naive... why would journalism bother respecting this? it's not as if blogworld has exercised leverage yet (what leverage does it have? not much but not none)

however, this IS routinely compromised by two things -- one is these days a semi-public scandal, the trades we know journalists make for high-end access, whether it's get the tom cruise interview, or not to comromise yr paper's regular seat at the white houser press conference -- and two is the (unspoken?) trades a writer may make with the (out) crew he admires and wants to be in with

(hirshman isn't really a journalist, and salon isn't in this sense old-school media -- it's all online -- so this is even further complicated and blurred)

[koganbot]

I am delighted that I am not the only one who regularly confuses Slate and Salon.

I wouldn't be surprised if a frequent reason people use screen names is that they don't want their employers to know that they are posting during working hours.

[koganbot]

Sentence I would like to see in the NY Times:

The source asked not to be identified because she had called in sick to work that day.

[koganbot]

Even if Hirshman had posted the original review on a blog, why should she care what hilzoy wants, especially given that it was hilzoy who originally commented on Hirshman and not vice versa? Not a rhetorical question, since if I were in Hirshman's position I might care. Or I might not. Depends on the circumstances. There's my parenthetical wonderment above, about hilzoy: "I wonder what right she thinks she has to anonymity if she's going to blog about stuff that's related to what she gets paid to teach and write about" (and yes, it's pseudonymity not anonymity). I mean, if I blog under a pseudonym and I can potentially analyze and critique ANYONE IN THE WORLD, why should A PARTICULAR SOMEONE IN THE WORLD WHOM I'M WRITING ABOUT care what I want?

don't simply make free with other people's personal info, even if it's somewhat known to the locals...

Well, "personal info" covers a range here (Hirshman stuck with real name and faculty position, which are hardly private). But you can get a situation where insiders know and outsiders don't, e.g., I remember some people on ilX doing the online equivalent of snickering at a newbie who got Jess's gender wrong. Jess and Ethan switched monikers a number of times, and I don't think they cared about anonymity/pseudonymity in the least, but if they had that would have been their problem, because they had absolutely no right to it given that they regularly flamed people and started fights (often flames and fights of high quality, that I empathized with), in fact if someone published those guy's phone numbers and penis sizes it probably would have been justified. I think Kate Masonic Boom did care about her anonymity and pseudonymity and given her behavior she had no more right to it than Jess and Ethan did, though in general I also believed that she should be treated with kindness. On the ilX thread about Chuck's firing, and ex-New Times employee, writing under a pseudonym, called the New Times brass "bullies at the cocktail hour." I have what I think is a good idea who this poster was, and if I'd known for certain I wouldn't have outed him, since I was sympathetic with his viewpoint. But if I had been friends with Lacey et al. at New Times and hadn't been sympathetic to the poster I'd have no qualms about outing him. And I don't see where Lacey et al. wouldn't have had a right to identify the guy by name, if they knew the name, or why identifying him would become some violation merely because he was posting on a message board rather than writing for a publication.

A reason I might choose pseudonymity would be aesthetic: to play with tones of voice, to unleash something in my prose that would be less likely to happen under the name "Frank Kogan." And I suppose that someone who valued the writing would honor my pseudonymity. In WMS #6 I not only wrote under my own name but under "Al Capone" and "Kylie Minogue's Bra-Strap," though there was never any question that it was me. But here's the point: if, under my pseudonym, I'm critiquing the hell out of people, running cultural analyses etc., I don't see what right I have to expect people to honor my pseudonym. I might want them to, and if they admire the prose they might choose to, but I don't see why I should expect them to. Especially why should I expect the people I analyze to honor my pseudonym? It's not as if I'm a whistle-blower or that I'll get jailed for my opinions.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

is there an american equivalent to the phrase "not cricket"? that's the level i take hilzoy's complaint to be on -- that within the context of a serious political discussion (given quite sharp differences sharply expressed, but ostensibly mutually respectful), hirshman had done something that, while it was not against any established rules of debate, nevertheless seemed (to hilzoy) to be, well, infra dig, "not done, old fellow", to use some other old-times english-gentleman phrases of deprecation... as if hirshman has lowered the tone of the debating club rather than in any sense departed from the strict rules

[koganbot]

I think most Americans understand "not cricket." But (1) is hilzoy right? and (2) is cricket right? What does Judge Dubdobdee think? Also, hilzoy is saying that she imagined that simply by posting as hilzoy she'd made her wishes known. But anyway, again, why should Hirshman care about those wishes, or about what's cricket? (Not a rhetorical question.) And don't readers of Slate, some of whom aren't regulars to hilzoy's blog neighborhood, have an interest in knowing a piece of info - hilzoy's identity - that a good deal of people inside that 'hood do know? (That's also not a rhetorical question.) Why is it cricket to critique people while writing under a pseudonym? (Again, not a rhetorical question, and I might well defend hilzoy's use of a pseudonym, if I knew the reasons.) (And also I may well be wrong about what the regulars in hilzoy's blog 'hood know and don't know.)

(Some posters were suggesting that Hirshman was simply being clumsy. But anyway, I'm not particularly trying to come up with a "whose right?" in relation to hilzoy and Hirshman, though in this instance hilzoy seems to be the better writer/thinker.)