Blogging Anonymity

Lots of discussion on the Internet today regarding blogging anonymity. Digby, among others, prefers anonymity, and refers back to the pampleteers of the American Revolution:

In the early days of usenet and internet communities people adopted noms de plume, sometimes as an affectation, but most often as a function of insecurity about the new medium. Unlike their revolutionary predecessors, they weren't afraid of the crown but they were afraid of losing their jobs if their political views became known.

...As the political internet grew out of this early manifestation, many of us maintained our pseudonyms when we started our own blogs, partly because the people we already interacted with "knew" us by that name. Our identities in this community were more real than our legal names.

...There is also freedom in this kind of writing and an intellectual challenge. Writing as a genderless entity, without history or corporeal identity and without (usually) allowing myself to resort to personal anecdote or appeals to authority, I think my arguments became sharper, more tightly reasoned. The blogging ethic (driven by the technology that allows it) requires that one not only make a logical and consistent argument, but one must document and substantiate one's work by linking to source material. These demands that bloggers "show their work" and the feedback from our highly intelligent audience of pedants and political junkies served as a kind of diffuse editorial check that lends credibility over time to any blogger but especially to pseudonymous writers like me --- at least among my readers.

...Many of the pamphleteers wrote pseudonymously and many of the founders and revolutionaries wrote pseudonymously in newspapers from time to time as well, which meant that nobody knew if it was an "important" or "unimportant" personage making the argument. ... Fortunately we live in less dangerous times (for the moment, anyway) when it comes to the government. But for many who write psuedonymously it is still dangerous for them to write about politics --- after all, the law allows people to be fired solely for their political beliefs --- and in the real world we all know that there can be great risk of derailing your career by going against the bosses wishes. Who among us hasn't pulled our punches in front of the boss? Blogging pseudonymously, for all its drawbacks, has the very particular advantage of honesty, with all that that implies, in a political world that is dominated by elite interests that impact the average person's livelihood as much as the crown impacted the lives of the colonial revolutionaries. There is value in that even if it is, at times, rude and uncivil.

So, the principle advantage of anonymity is the ability to write frankly. One downside is that it's possible to lose discipline and write intemperately, which you might not do if your real name was attached to the final product. Speaking for myself, I've always considered intemperateness to be the greater danger, and not fear of job loss, which is why this Web Log will remain Marc Valdez Weblog.