April 2, 2008
To Be, or Not To Be, Anonymous
Are there legitimate reasons why academics might withhold their names when writing about university issues? Or are professors just being spineless by using pseudonyms? A couple of bloggers have raised that question in response to an essay in The Chronicle this week that attacked the use of anonymity in academe. In that commentary, Peter Plagans criticized three previous Chronicle essays by saying “none of them seem to require an author’s pseudonym for any other reason than the author’s being — not to put too fine a point on it — chicken.”
He goes on:
Academe has enough trouble with its public image as — to many — a terrarium for fragile, frightened creatures who can’t “make it in the real world,” without its members exacerbating the situation by hiding behind pseudonyms when they feel like getting rueful.
But Female Science Professor, an anonymous blogger, says Plagans misses the point. In her post, she argues that concerns about safety cannot be dismissed so easily. She routinely gets comments that are obscene or threatening in her blog:
Why would I want these sick people to know exactly who I am, where I live, where my daughter goes to school? In my real, non-anonymous academic life, I have dealt with enough unstable people, including one who threatened my child, to know that I’d rather not expand my personal encounters with such people, even if most of them are just jerks who would never do more than try to post an obscene (anonymous) comment on a blog.
A commenter on her blog raises a frequently mentioned point that women get different treatment in the blogosphere:
Female bloggers, anonymous or otherwise, receive orders of magnitude more vicious, hateful, and threatening comments and e-mails than male bloggers, regardless of the content of their posts and solely for daring to speak publicly as a woman.
At Thus Spake Zuska, one commenter says she even has a pseudonym for her pseudonym. In her primary online persona, she does not disclose that she is female, but she does with her second pseudonym. She says the concerns about reprisals are real: “I have a bitter and twisted history having been harassed out of my previous employment.”
The original, anonymous essayists for The Chronicle also rose to their own defense here.
(Photo of “Anonymus” is a freely licensed media file from the Wikimedia Commons.)
rmonastersky | Posted on Wednesday April 2, 2008 | Permalink
Comments
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Oh yeah, all this sounds familiar. Post your name and you could be out of a job or worse. I don’t think there’s anything “chicken” about acknowledging that.
I DO think the more people use their real names, the more protection we will gain as bloggers because the rest of the world will know we don’t have to put up with harassment and we will NOT put up with it. Internet law will expand and grow, as it needs to. So if anyone wants to join in my rebellion, please do. “Bloggers Undressed Unite!”
— kgotthardt Apr 3, 05:46 AM #
You just can’t imagine how many miscreants are walking around, let alone lurking on the Internet. People get death threats for stating innocuous generalities; specific accusations bring about government action with telecom complicity. Get used to anonymity; it’ll be the only means of survival against Big Brother.
— marci Apr 3, 07:34 PM #