The Value of Anonymity

Atrios has some observations worth reading on blogging and anonymity:

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately, and I have some advice for new bloggers: do it anonymously, at first at least.

There’s a distinction between private/public figure which isn’t always perfectly clear, but it’s something that the internet totally destroys. If you write something on the internet, it’s public. A big blog links to it, suddenly you go from 50 hits per day to 5000 in one day. 5 hours later, CNN puts it on their “inside the blogs” segment, and suddenly you’ve gone national to a non-blog reading audience who are perhaps unaware of conventions of blogging.

I think that until you blog for awhile it’s hard to quite get a handle on how much you want to be public versus being private, and how easily blogging and the internet and the media can tear down that wall in a way you never expected.

I agree, and if I had it to do over again, I’d blog anonymously. I haven’t suffered any meaningful professional setbacks from blogging, but I think about the possibility regularly, as do others who have an interest in my career. It is not good, in my view, to have a professional persona associated with a set of political commitments and a certain form of discourse. I don’t, for example, need potential employers to read the endless comment thread that followed the Kim Du Toit incident. I think that this is especially true for those of us who work in a relatively small professional community, and of course for anyone even vaguely associated with government work. I have suggested to new bloggers who’ve asked that they should retain their anonymity, and I think it would be good to make that standing advice.

The other option is just not to say anything stupid, not to blog while drunk, and not to pick fights with surly South Africans. But that cure is worse than the disease. . .