Nominal Fetishism
In the Washington Post, Tom Grubisch complains that too many bloggers and commenters are anonymous.
If Web sites required posters to use their real names, while giving the shield of pseudonymity when it's merited, spirited online debate would continue unimpeded. It might even be enhanced by attracting contributors who are turned off today by name calling and worse. Except for the hate-mongers, who wouldn't want that?
When Paul and I started writing, first on Bear Left! and then on this site, we used our real names, probably because it never occurred to us that anyone would try to injure us, either literally or metaphorically, for our political opinions. Plus, we never thought that we would get much of an audience, anyway.
As it turned out, we were right that no one tried—as far as we know—to injure us, and—amazingly enough—our rants and commentary received literally dozens of readers each day, not just our families and a few amused colleagues.
Just because we used our real names, however, does not mean that everyone feels safe doing so.
Furthermore, our popularity, or lack thereof, had everything to do with the articles and other content that we cobbled together, and nothing to do with how we signed it. Grubisch makes up a straw man named "anticrat424" at a hypothetical town meeting.
Everybody at the meeting is wearing nametags. You approach a cluster of people where one man is loudly complaining about waste in school spending. "Get rid of the bureaucrats, and then you'll have money to expand the school," he says, shaking his finger at the surrounding faces.
You notice his nametag—"anticrat424." Between his sentences, you interject, "Excuse me, who are you?"
He gives you a narrowing look. "Taking names, huh? Going to sic the superintendent's police on me? Hah!"
In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. anticrat424 is continually elevated to the podium, where he can have his angriest thoughts amplified through cyberspace as often as he wishes. He can call people the vilest names and that hate-mongering, too, will be amplified for all the world to see.
The problem is not that anticrat424 is anonymous, but that he is being a jerk. In a real town meeting, which is limited by law to the voters in a particular town, it is important to know that the folks debating the question set forth to the community are members of the community; they are going to be voting on the issue sometime that evening. But the value of much debate at town meeting is in what is said at the debate, and less by who says it. (When someone uses anonymity to shield a conflict of interest, then the debate is often much the worse for it, but conflicts of interest can and do exist all the time in venues where anonymity is impossible.)
The American polity, which is the basis for the town meeting that Grubisch so clearly loves, rests in no small part to the excellent arguments for the constitutional system set forth in The Federalist Papers. Was it really so awful that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay used the pseudonym Publius to write their persuasive essays? No, and therein lies the problem with the Internet nannies like Grubisch. Pseudonyms do not ruin constructive debate, but stupid debate tricks do. If the anticrat424s are hijacking your debate threads, go tell them to get their own soapboxes—there is no need to tell Publius to sod off as well.
What makes Grubisch's cranky essay so irritating is that the Washington Post, like almost every other major American newspaper, publishes a daily, unsigned, editorial column. While the editorial board of the Post is not anonymous, it is rare for the Post (or any newspaper) to report which editorial board members were responsible for a particular editorial, let alone report which members supported the stance of a particular editorial. How very ironic.
Labels: anonymity, Net nannies, stupid Washington Post tricks
