[BRIEF NOTE] Anonymity in my Weblogging
Jan. 6th, 2005 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldOn the undertrafficked but interesting livejournal commnity ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
weblogsociology, there is an interesting discussion concerning the role of anonymity in weblogging. My weblog, unlike most of my friends', is not at all anonymous. "Randy McDonald" corresponds to an actual person named Randy McDonald; there is a fairly close correspondence, in fact, with the main difference between "Randy McDonald" and the actual person of the same name being a somewhat greater tendency towards extraversion. This difference is fading, I think.
Recent events on my friends list have made me think about the reasons for this tight correspondence. My weblog is public; my weblog uses my name, not a nom de plume. When I first set things up back in May of 2002, thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
roosterbear's kind donation of the then-necessary LJ code, I just wasn't thinking about anonymity. I suppose that's because, by that point, I'd been active for almost five years on USENET, mainly in soc.history.what-if, under my own name. Protecting my real identity against google searches by friends or employers, given this extensive archive, was something that I should have thought about much earlier. And by this point, of course, it's completely useless for me to hide.
I don't think that my non-anonymity can harm me. Compare, for instance, Adam Yoshida, he who I first noted here before he got kicked off of Livejournal, here when he proposed the construction of an American star empire willing to enslave aliens, here when he favoured genocide as a tool for nation-building. He has a very high profile: see here and here.
Unfortunately for him, Adam comes across--rightly--as a crazed far-right-wing lunatic willing to engage in massive violations of human rights in the pursuit of his marginal goals. Will this harm him in his everyday life? I suspect so; I certainly hope so.
Have I written anything deserving of comparable mass criticism? I don't believe so; I certainly hope not. I'd like to eventually position myself as a writer, and I'd like to think that the linking of my name torfmcdpei's essays will help me with my positioning. Granted, this weblog deals with issues apart from my essays, like my personal life. I don't believe that I'm excessively revealing, though, and I do think that recounting my personal life humanizes me. If I must, I can always resort to Livejournal's very useful filters.
weblogsociology, there is an interesting discussion concerning the role of anonymity in weblogging. My weblog, unlike most of my friends', is not at all anonymous. "Randy McDonald" corresponds to an actual person named Randy McDonald; there is a fairly close correspondence, in fact, with the main difference between "Randy McDonald" and the actual person of the same name being a somewhat greater tendency towards extraversion. This difference is fading, I think.Recent events on my friends list have made me think about the reasons for this tight correspondence. My weblog is public; my weblog uses my name, not a nom de plume. When I first set things up back in May of 2002, thanks to
roosterbear's kind donation of the then-necessary LJ code, I just wasn't thinking about anonymity. I suppose that's because, by that point, I'd been active for almost five years on USENET, mainly in soc.history.what-if, under my own name. Protecting my real identity against google searches by friends or employers, given this extensive archive, was something that I should have thought about much earlier. And by this point, of course, it's completely useless for me to hide.I don't think that my non-anonymity can harm me. Compare, for instance, Adam Yoshida, he who I first noted here before he got kicked off of Livejournal, here when he proposed the construction of an American star empire willing to enslave aliens, here when he favoured genocide as a tool for nation-building. He has a very high profile: see here and here.
Unfortunately for him, Adam comes across--rightly--as a crazed far-right-wing lunatic willing to engage in massive violations of human rights in the pursuit of his marginal goals. Will this harm him in his everyday life? I suspect so; I certainly hope so.
Have I written anything deserving of comparable mass criticism? I don't believe so; I certainly hope not. I'd like to eventually position myself as a writer, and I'd like to think that the linking of my name to
rfmcdpei's essays will help me with my positioning. Granted, this weblog deals with issues apart from my essays, like my personal life. I don't believe that I'm excessively revealing, though, and I do think that recounting my personal life humanizes me. If I must, I can always resort to Livejournal's very useful filters.
