Pseudonymity and the lack thereof

[mmcirvin]

The Editors of The Poor Man have decided to put some distance between their online and real-world identities, and are no longer posting under their collective name. This is not so hard to figure out by other means, but I suppose that making it less than blindingly obvious might discourage certain types of harassment by people of little brain. The move seems to have inspired some of the usual fretting about online identity by other blog folk.

This is something that people with public Internet presences have struggled with for a long time; I think there's no one correct approach. Some people post under a strict pseudonym (or two or three for different aspects of their lives); others have easy-to-decipher handles; and still others (me included) use their real names more or less exclusively. Occasionally, dimwits who would not think twice about unsigned editorials in newspapers imply that there is something unsavory about speaking under a pseudonym.

I'm with those (such as Clay Shirky) who say that our primary use of names in discussion fora is as a means of managing reputations and points of view; so as long as there's a persistent pseudonymous identity that is capable of carrying on a dialogue and acquiring its own reputation, there's nothing particularly bad about it. What is irritating is to switch between several different identities in the course of a discussion, or to use sock puppets, because that violates the persistence of identity that makes it possible to have a conversation. People who do that are typically up to no good. But most pseudonymous people on the Internet don't do that.

Some people take a contrary opinion, that you ought to stand by your words to such a degree as to risk personal or professional destruction as a result of what you say. My attitude is that only an irrational jerk would seek to take somebody down over an online flamewar anyway, and such a person could be set off by even innocent and reasonable speech, so there's no great loss of honor in taking steps to prevent this.

Nevertheless, in my own dealings I use my own name exclusively, and have no great desire to do otherwise. Mostly this is out of laziness: I don't trust my own mental ability to manage multiple nonoverlapping identities, and the prospect of going to the effort makes my head hurt.

I don't think this actually has a large effect on my online writing. I've never been much of a public diarist in the traditional LiveJournal confessional mode. I take care not to talk about my job (apart from broad indications that I'm a programmer), and I try not to violate the privacy of others, but I think the situation would be pretty much the same if I were posting under another name.

I don't take particular care to avoid controversial or bizarre subject matter, which I would not take in any event. I've never been one to post inflammatory things just to be inflammatory; I don't like to start fights that I'm not willing to see through. But I do sometimes talk about controversial things, and write humor and fiction pieces that the average person might find baffling or disturbing (if only because they don't get the jokes, which is more offensive to some people than encountering outright raunch). I figure that anyone who would shun me for that reason is somebody that I probably do not want to associate with anyway.

Sometimes this has repercussions. Friends of my parents have Googled for me online, or stumbled somehow on my Web site (particularly the Kibology section), and remarked to my folks that I am unsettlingly weird. I find this funny, since my output is so much less weird than that of other people I know. But that in itself doesn't drive me to self-censor. I figure that my stint moderating a newsgroup made me more enemies than anything I'm likely to say.

Comments

[bram.livejournal.com]

This was very thoughtful and even-handed, thanks.

[graydon.livejournal.com]

yeah, my experience has been that it's too much effort to maintain multiple identities. also that the use of a pseudonym encourages you to think that it is "isolated", and thus encourages a little bit of wrecklessness. of course there is no such isolation; even very well designed nym schemes are usually defeatable by some form of correlation analysis. it is easier to live just taking responsibility for your words and actions.

I tend to think, trying to read through the hyperbole, that david brin's position on transparency ("we are all losing privacy and it is not altogether bad so long as it's mutual") is ok, if prone to abuse by malignant governments and companies. the balance we strike will be written into law and common conduct, not technical capability. witness canada's new privacy laws.