One of the things we used to talk about a lot in the early academic blogosphere was the difference between academic bloggers who wrote under their own names and academic bloggers who used pseudonyms but who had consistent online personas and wrote from their experience. The major thing everybody noticed is that the true name writers were predominantly white men; the pseudonym writers were mostly women or people of color.
There were a lot of reasons why that was so. Women online had already long since learned by having a female name meant a lot of unwanted sexual approaches; having an identifiable true name meant those approaches were tied to your real life. (Men who had female avatars in massively-multiplayer games or whose pseudonyms were perceived as feminine-sounding discovered this as well.) But I think the most important thing was that the men felt comfortable handling any pushback they might receive but also felt that their concerns expressed in blogging (whether about their scholarly field or about academia) were about public matters. The pseudonymous academic bloggers wanted to talk about what wasn't public, to look for connections with other writers via the exploration of what was private, tacit, behind the scenes in scholarly work and in academic institutions. That meant they had to be able to breach confidentiality safely, to talk about personal experience, to consider implied or implicit behavior and practice.
This also was tied to something of an unequal distribution of reward and credit. I got approached a lot by early academic bloggers about whether their institutions would give them credit at tenure for what they were doing. I didn't ask for that for myself, because I was indeed easily distracted and was rarely producing work that I thought 'counted' in that sense. But there were people who I thought were absolutely producing scholarly knowledge in blog format who ought to have been credited, and sometimes they were. But the pseudonymous work is what was often catalyzing moral and political conversation about institutions--in some sense it had a higher "impact factor" but also couldn't really be given credit because of what it was. The Invisible Adjunct was a huge catalyst for making everybody in academia aware of how destructive the turn to contingent labor had become, but that couldn't be part of her c.v.
Yeah, Invisible Adjunct was great, and really changed my perspective on a lot of things (she was also a bit of a cautionary tale about the difficulty of maintaining a pseudonym, as I remember a friend figured out who she was pretty easily). Confessions of a Community College Dean was also a big influence in my thinking about academia beyond the weird elite little corner I've spent so much of my life in. I also really miss Acephalous, which came to a tragic end (and wasn't really pseudonymous...).
I think there's a bit of a difference between what Invisible Adjunct was doing, speaking out about broad systemic issues in very general terms, and a kind of more personalized pseudonymous blogging that I still see sometimes, which is what I had in mind in the post. This takes the general form "This thoroughly mediocre colleague got an honor that should've gone to me, because I'm clearly more awesome." While that certainly does happen, it's not uncommon for people to portray themselves as oppressed superstars who are, in fact, neither. There's always a bit of doubt that creeps in, for me at least, about whether they're genuinely being done wrong, or just That Kind of Person, who perceives even perfectly reasonable treatment as a series of personal slights.
It's probably also worth mentioning that there are also a handful of academic-ish blogs that used pseudonymity as a shield for reprehensible behavior that they would excuse by reference to systemic issues. I never had much use for those folks.
One of the things we used to talk about a lot in the early academic blogosphere was the difference between academic bloggers who wrote under their own names and academic bloggers who used pseudonyms but who had consistent online personas and wrote from their experience. The major thing everybody noticed is that the true name writers were predominantly white men; the pseudonym writers were mostly women or people of color.
There were a lot of reasons why that was so. Women online had already long since learned by having a female name meant a lot of unwanted sexual approaches; having an identifiable true name meant those approaches were tied to your real life. (Men who had female avatars in massively-multiplayer games or whose pseudonyms were perceived as feminine-sounding discovered this as well.) But I think the most important thing was that the men felt comfortable handling any pushback they might receive but also felt that their concerns expressed in blogging (whether about their scholarly field or about academia) were about public matters. The pseudonymous academic bloggers wanted to talk about what wasn't public, to look for connections with other writers via the exploration of what was private, tacit, behind the scenes in scholarly work and in academic institutions. That meant they had to be able to breach confidentiality safely, to talk about personal experience, to consider implied or implicit behavior and practice.
This also was tied to something of an unequal distribution of reward and credit. I got approached a lot by early academic bloggers about whether their institutions would give them credit at tenure for what they were doing. I didn't ask for that for myself, because I was indeed easily distracted and was rarely producing work that I thought 'counted' in that sense. But there were people who I thought were absolutely producing scholarly knowledge in blog format who ought to have been credited, and sometimes they were. But the pseudonymous work is what was often catalyzing moral and political conversation about institutions--in some sense it had a higher "impact factor" but also couldn't really be given credit because of what it was. The Invisible Adjunct was a huge catalyst for making everybody in academia aware of how destructive the turn to contingent labor had become, but that couldn't be part of her c.v.
Yeah, Invisible Adjunct was great, and really changed my perspective on a lot of things (she was also a bit of a cautionary tale about the difficulty of maintaining a pseudonym, as I remember a friend figured out who she was pretty easily). Confessions of a Community College Dean was also a big influence in my thinking about academia beyond the weird elite little corner I've spent so much of my life in. I also really miss Acephalous, which came to a tragic end (and wasn't really pseudonymous...).
I think there's a bit of a difference between what Invisible Adjunct was doing, speaking out about broad systemic issues in very general terms, and a kind of more personalized pseudonymous blogging that I still see sometimes, which is what I had in mind in the post. This takes the general form "This thoroughly mediocre colleague got an honor that should've gone to me, because I'm clearly more awesome." While that certainly does happen, it's not uncommon for people to portray themselves as oppressed superstars who are, in fact, neither. There's always a bit of doubt that creeps in, for me at least, about whether they're genuinely being done wrong, or just That Kind of Person, who perceives even perfectly reasonable treatment as a series of personal slights.
It's probably also worth mentioning that there are also a handful of academic-ish blogs that used pseudonymity as a shield for reprehensible behavior that they would excuse by reference to systemic issues. I never had much use for those folks.