Blogging Ethics Debate, Ver 2.301

Posted by Richard Blair at 2:00 PM on May 15, 2007.

You know it's a slow news week when the "A" list blogs on the left are engaged in intense navel gazing over the issue of using pseudonyms in either running a blog or commenting on someone else's blog. The entire blogospheric discussion was initiated by a column in Sunday's WaPo by Tom Grubisich, who opined (in part):

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...

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the earliest "pamphleteers" of the web responded to Grubisich's concerns. Atrios sums up the anonymity issue nicely when he says:

Pseudonymity allows people to participate in the public discourse who for a variety of reasons wouldn't be able to otherwise. It offers little protection for criminal speech (threats of violence) or for those who engage in libel.

Ezra Klein believes that Grubisich's column is little more than a bushel of sour grapes for someone who is financially (and socially) anchored to the foundation of the legacy media, and who has yet to come to terms with the rapidly shifting nature of information delivery (and, yes, the "power" of participation by rabble such as myself):

Grubisich thinks the public square has become too open, and he wants to erect some new barriers to entry. That's what the pseudonymity discussions are always about: Privileged members of the media feeling great anxiety that they're no longer set apart simply by access to microphones and looking for ways to keep the barbarians off the stage...

Indeed. And Digby takes Ezra even one step further, in a stunning piece of personal navel gazing at Hullabaloo:

In the early days of usenet and internet communities people adopted noms de plume, sometimes as an affectation, but most often as a function of insecurity about the new medium. Unlike their revolutionary predecessors, they weren't afraid of the crown but they were afraid of losing their jobs if their political views became known...

This, I think, is the essence of any argument re: anonymity in political blogging (or even, in commenting on blogs). Back in the day of usenet, fidonet, RIME, and dialup bulletin boards, anonymity was not so much of an issue. In fact, on a dialup BBS that I ran out of my home office in the late 80's and early 90's, I required "real" names (or, at least, a verifiable personal entity that I could contact) for members of my online bulletin board. At the time, though, online communications were the domain of the most geeky among us.

But as a few high-profile employment cases relative to online communications began to wind through state labor boards and courts, a new dynamic emerged: employers (or potential employers) started googling names of employees (or potential employees). No longer could a General Motors employee run a website, under their own name, that in any way criticized their employer or their employer's products. There are quite a few high profile cases of such people losing their jobs and landing in legal hot water...

When I first started dabbling on the web in the early to mid-90's, my first personal website was a fan website devoted to a particular movie star. It didn't start out as a fan site, but evolved into one over a period of time, and was well traffic'd and highly praised in the print gossip media - and the day that I received a cease-and-desist letter from the star's attorney, I simply shut down the site. How was schlub like me going to fight such a request in court? The reason the star's attorney was able to track me down is because I was using my real name at the time, he knew my location, and simply opened a phone book. It was clear from the outset that the letter was no more than a harassment attempt to get me to shut down the site, which I wouldn't have done, except I didn't have the resources to fight a movie star.

More than a decade has passed since my introduction to "content control by lawyers". So, I moved away from fan websites, and moved onto creating more technically oriented sites which were targeted toward industry professionals. I still used my own name, as much for cred purposes as anything else. But even those endeavors were fraught with professional risk: if you're on the wrong side of a technical issue, no matter how passionate you are about the issue, the fact that you were on the wrong side will follow you around google forever, thereby damaging future employment prospects.

So, when those endeavors ran their course, and I decided to start a political blog back in 2003, the question was: anonymous or not? I chose online anonymity (Richard Cranium) for one reason and one reason only - my political viewpoints did not mesh with those of the party in power, and the Bush regime (or their designated scalp hunters) had already shown it had absolutely no problems with going after regime opponents. In a post-9/11 and pre-Iraq online environment, my progressive opinions were certainly in the minority. I'm sure that Atrios and Digby and Billmon and others in the emerging left blogosphere began their blogging in anonymous fashion for much the same reason. We wanted to protect ourselves and our families from retribution by our government and/or our employers (for some of us, that was one and the same).

As reputations and influence have grown, the need for maintaining anonymity via pseudonym has diminished to a degree, but certainly not for the casual blogger or blog commenter. There is at least some modicum of protection in notoriety, even if not as much as in anonymity. To some extent, being "out" in one's true online persona also confers a degree of credibility to what one writes - whether negative cred or positive cred. It's always been the nature of writing, whether in print or online.

Cloaked or not, it doesn't take a tremendous amount of CSI work by government agencies or law enforcement to track down an anonymous blogger (or commenter) who's posting personal threats or proposing seditious acts. So, to come back full circle, the reason that folks like Tom Grubisich get their pantaloons in a knot about anonymity in online communications is fairly simple. Folks like me have attained some level of success in storming the gates of political discourse that was previously reserved for the socially vetted and the journalistically elite. Someone like me will never belong to either of those fraternities.

Oh, to be sure, some of us electronic wastrels will be and have been (tentatively) invited into the fourth estate's castle. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, and Kevin Drum are three examples that come immediately to mind of progressive voices that are now working in the sphere of the legacy media. What concerns people like Tom Grubisich is not that we have a few representatives at the table, but that representatives such as Greenwald and Yglesias have already developed a lot of influence. Even more concerning to folks like Grubisich is the emergence of independent media, such as TPM Media. Josh Marshall has developed a lot of influence, investigative horsepower, and online credibility - completely absent of direct legacy media support - simply because he's put together a good business plan, produces an excellent product, and is good at what he does. Isn't that what the free market is about, whether one is hawking the latest mousetrap design or purveying political information? The cream rises.

Tim Berners-Lee's world wide web has been the engine that caused an entirely different paradigm of information (and opinion) delivery to emerge. There are no longer any guardians determining what is acceptable or correct discourse, and particularly in the political arena, this is powerful beyond belief. I saw it coming 15 years ago, although I was never able to leverage my vision into some big VC bucks during the dot com boom.

Unlike Tom Grubisich, those are my only sour grapes.

Tagged as: mainstream media, legacy media

Richard Blair is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer, and the blogmaster of All Spin Zone.