Our current blog flavor of the week has been brought to you by the New York Times. (Link to Lindsay rather than the NYT. She sums it up well for people who don’t wish to go further. Plus I like her more than I like the NYT.)
Short version: young woman hired as nanny for Yuppie NYC couple. Employers read blog. Woman fired. Employers take revenge by writing grossly inaccurate bitch-slap article in New York Times. Blog world uproar ensues.
Personally, I don’t care, aside from the interesting devolution of the once staid New York Times into a competitor for shelf space in the Weekly World News rack. What’s interesting to me are some of the comments from passersby deriding the young woman for not blogging anonymously.
I have to say that with a very
few
ex-
ceptions, the blogs I find myself reading are not written pseudonymously. Whether it’s Lindsay Beyerstein’s Majikthise (and do yourself a favor and visit when you have some time to spend… she’s brilliant, funny, and has a huge range of interests: sort of a smarter, younger, female, much more attractive version of me) or PZ or Michael Bérubé or Roxanne or Timothy Burke or whoever, I prefer reading writing with a non-anonymous person standing behind it.
I hasten to add that I completely understand some of the reasons why people write pseudonymously. Not everyone is lucky enough to have tenure, or to work in an organization that values blunt, plain speaking. People just starting a career are extremely vulnerable to the whims and idiocies of their current or prospective employers. There are people in difficult non-work situations who benefit from a bit of privacy in expression as well. People who’re worried about, say, stalkers, have every right to blog, and I’m not going to begrudge them that.
I also understand that a handle can become a second, more or less valid identity, and that the owner of said handle can be every bit as concerned about maintaining “Flipper’s” credibility as they are about “Charles W. Johnson’s.” Or Atrios’s vs. Duncan Black’s, if you want a non-fictitious example. And I understand that some handles are deliberate affectations, that people use handles even if they’re not particularly trying to hide their legal identities. Whatever literary device works for you.
It just seems that the presumption is beginning to swing the other way, toward pseudonymity as the norm, with being “out” considered an aberration. In a recent thread at Lindsay’s place, a (very bright) commenter encouraged someone to say what they really intended by reminding them that “we’re all anonymous here.”
Well, um, no. Sure, a casual reader can’t immediately tell that I’m not actually Lyndon LaRouche. But it only takes a little effort to obtain my home phone number, and a small expenditure to find out which window you need to look into to see me sleeping at night.
Of course, I’m trying to build a reputation as a writer, and you can’t do that pseudonymously unless your career will also be pseudonymous. Some of it is a holdover, I think, from the days when I was a public non-registrant with the Selective Service System. Actually I guess I still am. Back then there were a lot of people quietly refusing to register, and I felt like someone ought to stand up and say so publicly. Some of it is a holdover from my days on Usenet, hanging out in places like alt.folklore.urban where handles were regarded with some suspicion, most of it probably due to the nefarious influence of AOL. And some of it is my vague journalistic background: you will look in vain for Reuters bylines along the lines of “Anaximander.”
It also helps that I don’t care very much about people’s reactions to my writing. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy making people think, and a thoughtful response to something I write will often make my day. And I hate hurting people’s feelings by accident or clumsiness. But I’ve inherited a certain atomistic self-containment from Dear Old Dad, and I’ve walked away from whole sets of friends in the past for less compelling reasons than saying what’s on my mind.
And the older I get, the less willing I am to second-guess myself.
My nonpseudonymous blogging pal Dave Bonta, in an incisive and wholly accurate criticism of a careless post a few notches down on this very blog, made a passing reference to that post’s having “ruined the effect” of the other, uniformly brilliantly written pieces to be found here. And I know he intended to warn me against carelessness, against taking out my passing irritations on my readers. (And sage advice it was, but on whom am I supposed to take them out?)
It was incidental to his point, but Dave’s choice of phrasing got me to thinking.
All writing has an effect, and a writer is disingenuous if he denies that the reader isn’t always in mind. But the moment I find that I’m wondering whether a blog post has the right “effect,” as opposed to whether I have something to say about the subject, is the moment I click that little “delete blog” link in the admin window. I already have enough places to write where I keep “the effect” uppermost in my mind. That’s not what this place is for.
And for me to use a pseudonym would be for me to surrender wholly to fear of “the effect.”
I don’t wish to tell anyone else how to run their blog. I wish others would extend those of us who write under our real names the same courtesy. When someone runs into unfair flak as a result of something they’ve written, I’d hope other bloggers’ first impulse would be to extend a bit of sympathy and support, and not to ask “well, what do you expect for putting your name out there?”
[Edited slightly to clarify my intent.]
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Blogging
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