Via Invisible Adjunct, I've now read the current (blogosphere) state of the art on anonymity. She kicks off with Amitai Etzioni's recent note on the topic, and I'm going to quote her quoting him to get me started:
" Anonymity, Etzioni writes, 'makes for much poorer conversations, meager relationships and impoverished communities. People are free to disregard the feelings of others, to deceive, and to prevent the formation of the true connections that result from gradually getting to know more and more about a person.' And 'above all,' he adds, 'they are able to avoid assuming responsibility for what they are saying.' "
I just don't get this criticism. I've been on-line in some form or another since 1989. When I've wanted to get to know someone better, I have; when I've wanted to hold someone accountable, I have (and been held accountable too). I invited an on-line friend to my wedding not knowing what his "real" name was, but he was, and is, one of my best friends (he came to the wedding, there was no doubt that he was my previously "anonymous" friend, we had a ball). I, using a pseudonym, was invited by another on-line friend to his daughter's third birthday party when I mentioned that I'd be in his city (I went, there was no doubt that I was who I said I was, we had a ball). The criticism is a non-starter - if anonymity is the real issue.
I can't help but see this as an attempt by the credentialed and self-important to shut the rest of us up. As far as I can tell it's all about being able to pigeonhole people and to prejudge whether or not they are worth reading/listening to. If it threatens people with "expertise" that any idiot - or genius - has a potentially equal platform with them, then the reasonable outcome should be that they just have to write better and more lucidly and make damn sure they get their facts right. So, I'm not a sociologist. So what. But maybe I still know a thing or two, and now so do my six readers. Why Mr Etzioni, with all his laurels and honors, feels threatened by pseudonymous me, I'll never know, but it seems to me that only authority is served by insisting on personal transparency.
Perhaps Mr Etzioni is just annoyed that people can call him names, or troll, or maybe can just call him on his shit (though this example, of course, is by a colleague). I'd suggest a walk, out among the millions of people who don't know him from Adam. You know the ones, out there actually participating in a community - without knowing the names, or even the jobs or marital status or religions or ancestry, of nearly everyone they interact with. I'm thinking of the nice lady at the bakery whose smile lights up the room, and my day, when she looks up and sees me. We've never spoken beyond what flavor croissant or scone I want, but we share an interest in our community. I'm thinking about the all the people at my bus stop with whom I share only a "good morning" and a brief daily discourse on the weather. I'm thinking of the guy who makes pizza around the corner, but who I see all over town. We always smile and wave and he never fails to ask about "that girl" he occasionally sees me with. That community of mine, that group of people whose lives interact and touch upon mine in the most direct of ways, is, according to the Communitarian Network, experiencing "a breakdown in the moral fabric of society". As far as I can tell, the breakdown is occurring a little higher up in the food chain; down here, where most of the people live, we're mostly doing right by one another.
In working with organizations doing peacework I have encountered time and again the idea of "reconciliation", an airing of grievance and an acceptance of repentance and then acts of forgiveness. Reconciliation is community work, involving everybody and getting them to really think about their responsibilities. And most people don't have time for that; they cannot spend all day in a conference room or sitting under a tree coming to terms with the past and figuring out how to live in the future. They have to work for a living and, for the most part, just want to get on with it. What people really want is "functional harmony", where the systems around us and through which we live work well enough to keep us alive and relatively secure. I don't have to know anything about my grocer, and I certainly don't have to be reconciled with him. As long as he sells me potatoes and eggs for a reasonable price my life is just fine, thanks.
Kip at Long story; short pier has a recent long-long piece, half of it a new introduction to the other which is an old piece from his days as a journalist, on radio consolidation and pirate responses - including another type of anonymity being used explicitly in the service of ideas of community.
Speaking for myself, I make a distinction between "anonymous" and "pseudonymous" and I am the latter. I do it because it amuses me - and anyone who wants to know "who" I am can just come to Boston and buy me a beer. As for "getting to know" me, a simple e-mail will get the ball rolling.
Really, this whole discussion is absurd: knowing what set of phonemes and their symbols my mother - and the government - uses to represent me tells you nothing. Damn, if you had that you could look me up in the phone book and, disregarding my feelings, crank call.
Posted by MartialIf I may use an unfashionable term, I think the problems of anonymity and community are actually symptoms of the general problem of alienation--and by that I mean the separation of individuals because of the division of labor. If someone's role as an economic producer, i.e., their role as a wage earner, is so complete that it becomes their identity, then in the large you'll see the erosion of (certain know types of) community, while in the small you'll see the resentments and frustrations that lead people to adopt pseudonyms and engage in hit-and-run polemics.
On the other hand, if one type of community is declining, another type is growing, and anonymity and/or pseudonymity has an important, positive role to play in it; you're already given the reasons.
So I'm basically in (long-winded) agreement with you. And I'm in Boston on a regular basis.
Posted by: Curtiss Leung on April 23, 2003 01:08 PM<self-criticism>
Clearly it was late and I was feeling it.
I was running on fumes there when I brought in "peacework". The point I was trying to make there is that "communitarianism" (at least as laid out in the manifesto) demands all sorts of work that most people won't do. I don't happen to disagree with anything in their manifesto, but I think it is a vision of community that goes well beyond what is necessary and sufficient (to use words . And that vision strikes me as similar to the vision of "reconciliation".
What set me off, what made me rather annoyed and so prompted this post, was seeing a professional sociologist making a broad prescription to a community which he does not seem to have spent any time observing. I'd have been irked by anyone making statements about me and mine that run precisely counter to my experience, but a professional observer of social interaction really, really should know better.
What's in a name? What makes one name more "real" or "honest" than another if I answer to both them?
</self-criticism>
The Responsive Communitarian Platform - the "manifesto" - can be found at
<http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/platformtext.html>
People wish to communicate, to speak and be heard. Many people do not have outlets where they can express themselves with a reasonable expectation that they will in fact be listened to. And so we develop strategies to open up some sort of communication with somebody.
Violence is one possibility, one that got me some attention when I was younger (while it "worked" in the sense that I was "heard", violence isn't usually a very good long term strategy).
Sometimes anonymity is the only way we feel safe enough to open our mouths. Sometimes anonymity can hide our ignorance, allowing us to ask stupid questions. Sometimes anonymity can be used as a dodge to assert stupid things (but, of course, only those things that have to be said). Sometimes being a troll is the only way we know how to be heard, to be sure we've been read because we got a reaction.
A request for "honesty instead of anonymity" seems to me exactly like asking people what they do for a living. In that case why don't WE adopt names like D-503 or I-330, describing every utilitarian thing about us, i.e. every societally important thing. Lewis Mumford worried endlessly over the idea that modern industry and its regimentation was turning workers into drones, only able to work and watch tv, resulting in complete identification with wage earning and alienation from their fellow human beings. And if Mumford is worried, and Mr Leung is worried, then so am I. Anything we can do to be more than we are . . . even to have no name.
To be fair to Amitai Etzioni, I've never known an academic whose professional work was worth salt who didn't also have a sideline on working to make the world a better place. Mr Etzioni has devoted years of his life to working on the world as well as writing about it, and I like that.
Posted by: Martial on April 25, 2003 12:47 AM