I know I shouldn’t do this, but I feel compelled to write a little about this whole blogger anonymity thing that’s all the rage with the kids these days. Some of you have probably noticed that my pseudonym lacks creativity and pizzaz. When I first started blogging I struggled to think of a decent blogger name and finally settled on one that would be pretty easy for me to remember even if I was really drunk. I’m not saying I always remember it, but usually some kind soul, like my wife or mother, will say something like “Chris, you’re drooling again” and jar my memory. I was originally going to go by Chris Baldwin, but the two extra syllables and the space just seemed like too much effort. I’m nothing if not a lazy bastard.
All of this is just a long stupid way of saying that I’ve never done this anonymously. That’s pretty easy for me to do because nobody cares who the hell I am. Furthermore, my employer isn’t going to fire me over what I write on a blog and even if they did, I pretty much hate my job anyway. I did take a step back once. About a year ago, after getting some fairly creepy comments and emails that struck me as a bit off, I decided to register my domain anonymously, just so that it would be a little harder for the average violent freak show to find my home address. I anguished over that a little bit and I think that if I was single and lived alone, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. I live in Philadelphia after all, and the average internet freak show probably has nothing on the guy taking a leak on my neighbor’s stoop.
I do have some advise though. If you decide to write a blog or publish anything on the internet, you should assume that you cannot stay anonymous. This is doubly true if people actually read what you write, though admittedly this is not a problem I’m familiar with. Just assume from the start that everything you ever write will eventually be read by your boss, your clients, your patients, your mom, your wife, your girlfriend, your mistress, your co-workers, your butcher, your students, your teachers, your cat, your friends, everybody who has ever hated you and would like to do you harm, the guy sleeping in a puddle of his own urine at the subway stop and anybody else I didn’t think of, because they will. Just count on it, and think about it before you hit the “post” button. Granted, if you actually ask any of those people to read what you wrote, they’ll avoid it at all costs.
Now I’m not saying that this is the way I think it ought to be, because I don’t. I think everybody should be able to remain just as anonymous as they would like to, but wanting it doesn’t make it so. If what you write on the internet is going to cause you any harm once people find out that you wrote it, then consider your choice to publish very carefully. Sometimes it’s worth the risk, but don’t be naive about it. There really is no shortage of political bloggers and there are a lot of other ways to get involved.
Now just to prove what a lazy bastard I am, I’m just going to republish, in full, something I wrote on this subject last November which has a slightly different focus. It’s a bad writer who copies his own work, and I’m nothing if not a bad writer. Just so this makes a little more sense and I don’t have to do any edits, the original title of the post was “When Jane Speaks You Should Listen”
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Jane covers politics, and Pennsylvania politics in particular, in a wonderfully wonkish, detailed and sober manner that is so refreshing and a real credit to political blogs. One need only read one of her weekly legislative roundup’s to get an idea of what Jane adds to the political blogosphere in terms of quality, depth of research and content (here’s the latest). I should also note that Jane has been a great friend to me and to this site over its short existence, something for which I am extremely grateful.
On to the listening bit. I was intrigued by one of Jane’s recent posts in which she discusses social norms and privacy as those terms and concepts apply to the internet generally and the blogosphere specifically. Here’s a little of what she has to say:
We as a society have come to some general understanding of personal space in a public setting. Unless an elevator is crowded we don’t stand close to each other. Smoking is prohibited in many public spaces. We have decided it violates our privacy when our social security numbers are used on everything from student id cards to health insurance cards.
The blogosphere, though, is still sorting through these things. A sense of what is private and what is public blurs in online journals. Where does someone’s virtual smoke end and where does our personal space begin? We’ve all read about people who lost (or found) jobs by virtue of their blogs. Many of us have heard about people who lost friends or significant others because of something written on their blogs. This isn’t really new. I remember Ma telling me never to put anything in print that I wouldn’t want to see in the newspaper the next day. When I was in college the student newspaper ran a photo of an elected student government official nude, from the back. It was taken and published with the man’s permission. Stories circulated about him nearly (or actually) losing a job when someone mailed the photo to his post-college employer.
There is quite a bit more discussion, so be sure to read the whole thing.
This issue is something which has been of interest to me for some time and which I have discussed on any number of occasions with friends who were jumping into the internet or into blogging. My advise to anybody who has a website, or is considering getting one, is to keep the words, actions, thoughts and feelings of private citizens, who haven’t given their explicit consent, as far from the content of your site as is humanly possible. Keep your impressions of the same even further.
The reason for this is simple, and I’ll spell it out in the most direct way possible. People don’t like seeing their shit displayed for the whole world to see all over the internet. People don’t react well to seeing their shit displayed for the whole world to see all over the internet. People who thought well of you yesterday, won’t think so well of you today, if just last night they saw that you were spreading their shit all over the internet.
You may have thought the discussion was benign and the words were kind, but just about everybody who is caught off guard will have a very seriously bad reaction. This I promise. Unless you intend to post anonymously until the end of days, or password protect all of your content, you should keep it in mind as it can have an adverse effect on nearly every aspect of you life.
Since I’ve made jokes about it in the past, I want to be clear that I’m not talking about mentions of me. While I don’t get why my presence at certain events merits mention, it has been mentioned quite a few times over the past year for whatever reason. Not only that, but the condition of my roof deck, the number of stairs leading to my appartment, the fact that I (used to) smoke too much for anybody’s good and even the contents of emails I thought were private have been published for all to see. Here’s the thing; I’m a non-anonymous political blogger (very part-time these days), who is well aware that when he is in the presence of anybody who has the ability to publish anything anywhere, that whatever I do and whatever I say is fair game. I knew that getting in and that was my decision. Any discussion of the poor condition of my roof deck or the poor condition of my lungs by a well read political blogger (no links to be sure) under any other circumstance would have been different to be sure.
Needless to say, one danger for a blog like this one, which relies more heavily on raw emotion, gut reaction and personal experience than it does rational analysis, is crossing the line in a heated moment and disparaging a non-public figure from your own personal life. Referring to the President or to your state representative by disparaging names is quite a bit different than referring to your butcher, cousin or boss in the same way. One is direct, if not polite, political discourse in the best tradition, while the other is something altogether more difficult.
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