A Blog by Any Other Name

Dr. Crazy has a post "On Remaining Nameless" in the blog-o-verse.

This response has been lingering as a draft since she posted, so here goes:

I could really care less about the identities of the people who write the blogs I read. That may seem a bit callous, but I'm not citing blogs as sources anymore than I would cite a discussion with a friend at a coffee shop as a source. I don't need anymore authority than the fact that the blogger is human.

Lie or truth, that which graces the page of a personal blog is just that, personal. Why should it matter that a person have professional authority to speak of personal experience? Why should it matter that I know your name when I can so easily relate to your story?

No famous novelist ever started out famous. At one point, no one who read an author's work cared who that author was. All you needed was the words on the page. That is what made you care. That it is what made you decide to keep reading or to stop. Blogs are no different. It is the words that matter, not the identity behind them.

To me, this seems to boil down to a question of authority. And I ask you, why do you need to know a blogger's authority? If your relationship to the blogger is only via the blog, and you aren't making important decisions based on what the blogger says, what reason is there?

Names are just names. They do not convey truth or essence. Knowing my real name does not make what I write any more or less valid than if I had written it under the name Poopy Pants instead of Tree of Knowledge.

One could argue that if you're claiming to be an expert, then you should not blog about that subject anonymously. Then again, that's exactly what advice columnists do. That's exactly what pop-psychologists do. You may have a name and a face, but that is not equivalent to authority. But these pop-psycho-columnist people are giving advice, which is very different from what most of do on a blog: share our thoughts on things that interest us to see what others think.

Isn't it amazing that we have this space, where the identity and authority of the writer/author doesn't matter? The only thing that matters is thoughts, ideas, and words. The anonymity allows us to have "real" discussions where the only thing in the discussion is the actual words on the page. It's amazing.

So really, I don't want to know who you are. I don't care, because that's not why I read blogs.

And yes, there are some people who know my real name - people I would be saying all of these things to in a coffee shop somewhere if I wasn't in Island State while they were on the mainland. But I normally don't think about them when I post. I just write. Do you know how freeing that is - to not write to an audience? Revealing my real name would remove part of that freedom.

Blog anonymity is not a matter of protecting myself because I might say things employers might not like. It's about taking full advantage of a medium where everyone stands on equal ground and only the content of your words determine whether or not anyone cares what you think.