True Names and Other Dangers
On pseudonymity and the lack thereof
I’m pretty sure it was January of 1992 when I first got access to email. I was taking a Winter Study (the January term when students took a single course) at Williams with the title “C, Unix, and the Joy of X,” introducing a bunch of fairly basic stuff about networked computers— ftp, telnet, all that fun stuff— and to be able to do that, we needed accounts on what I’m pretty sure was a VAX. The following fall, email access was extended to all students at the college for the first time, and it became a way to communicate with friends on campus, at least while I was at a networked computer. My friend Paul and I spent a long time one afternoon sending each other messages as we were working on our respective senior theses in labs on opposite side of the science quad, imagining various punishments we would like to inflict on the people we could see outside playing frisbee.
That account was, necessarily, tied to my real name, because it was issued to me by the college. It was also where I first discovered Usenet (via gopher, and then maybe rn), though I don’t think I posted from that. When I moved on to grad school, I got a school account that was based on a nickname, but still had my real name attached, and that’s when I really got involved in Usenet (using trn; ask your parents). When I shifted from Usenet to the then-new medium of blogs, I did so under my real name, because that’s how people on the Internet knew me, and that’s carried on for the (gulp) twenty-odd years since.
The point of this little trip down memory lane is that I’ve never really had a significant online presence that wasn’t immediately and directly traceable to me. This has some consequences with regard to what I’m willing to write— if your life is sufficiently dull and empty that trolling back through my online history seems like a good way to spend time, I’m sure you could map out the way I’ve become less combative and more circumspect as I’ve advanced into positions with more responsibility. (Though some of that is just getting older and more jaded. I don’t find arguing with idiots exhilarating any more; they’re just exhausting.)
I’m not particularly advocating for this approach; it just kind of happened that way for me. There’s another path to online interaction that I think is perfectly sensible and worthy of respect, namely the creation of a consistent pseudonym. As the ancient saying goes, on the Internet, nobody knows if you’re a dog. You’re just pixels on a screen, so you can present yourself in whatever medium you favor— text, audio, video— under any name you like, and as long as you’re consistent about using that name, you can build up an identity and level of credibility based on your public output.
This approach has both advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is the ability to speak more freely, at least for as long as you feel secure that your online identity cannot be traced back to your offline persona. If you want to lay into public figures in a way that would be awkward if casual acquaintances (or even friends and family) knew about it, you can do that. You can even vent about the behavior of close colleagues, should you feel the need, provided you put a bit of effort into anonymizing them enough that your security isn’t compromised.
One of the principal disadvantages is that need for operational security: it takes effort to hide your identity and that of the co-workers you might want to rant about well enough to avoid significant risk of exposure. That’s a tricky thing to do even when you’re calm, and I’m not entirely sure how people hold to it when in a ranting frame of mind. It’s the main reason why I’ve never made any effort to set up an alternative, pseudonymous outlet for my own opinions. I would be really, really bad at this— my writing style isn’t that distinctive, but there’s a voice to it that I suspect would jump out at people who know me. More importantly, I’m too lazy to do the work of creating a consistent set of alternative references for people around me that wouldn’t instantly give the game away.
A more subtle disadvantage of pseudonymity, though, is that it removes the ability to leverage credibility in other areas, credibility that can be hard-won. This is particularly acute when complaining about work. If I choose to say something about my qualifications for some position or another, the fact that I’m doing so under my real name means that anyone reading has the ability to go and check my references. I’m readily Google-able, and with one minor exception, my publication record is, well, public, and you can decide for yourself whether it supports whatever claim I’m using it to make.
On the other hand, there’s no level of consistency in pseudonymity that can provide that same link to external sources of credibility. This is primarily an issue when people complain about slights suffered at work— when somebody says under a pseudonym that they were passed over for a promotion or honor in favor of a colleague whose record is less impressive than their, I can’t assess that in the same way. Without the link to a real name and a public record, it’s just an A-said-B-said situation, with no objective way to compare A to B to say whether an injustice has been done. And I’ve known too many people with a vastly overinflated sense of their own significance to ever be fully confident that somebody complaining on the Internet has genuinely been done wrong, or if they’ve got an unjustified sense of entitlement. It ends up coming down to vibes and para-social relationships— “I’ve enjoyed this person’s writing for long enough that I’ll take their side”— and I never completely trust those.
So, on net, I’m pretty much comfortable with having my online presence tied directly to my offline identity. It’s less work that way, even if it does constrain me in some ways. There’s a level of fun invective that I don’t really get to deploy (“You have the reading comprehension of a slightly dim potato…”), and whole broad categories of issues where I have to tread carefully enough that I either don’t bother trying to thread that needle, or resort to writing 1500-word subtweets. But, you know, such is life.
And if you ever meet me in person, you can buy me a beer and get a slightly less filtered version of, well, me. Not completely unfiltered, because nobody ever gets (or really wants) that, but a bit less…
That’s a thing, all right. Here’s a button:
And if you have something to say, under whatever level of *nymity, the comments will be open:
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.