Hello all. I’ve been nursing a severe case of crankiness with a side of the blues over the past couple of days which has made me a poor blogger. Hopefully this will soon pass.
There’s been a disturbing exchange going on in sci fi fandom recently, which I won’t get into here because everything useful has already been said (my favorite post is actually by a friend of mine, here, which also links to this astonishingly thorough nutshell), but something that has become a side-issue of sorts is the question of using pseudonyms on the internet, and whether doing so diminishes a person’s credibility or perhaps even negates it entirely. As a person who has interacted online both using a pseudonym and using my real name, I find this attitude perplexing at best. Names, after all, are loaded things, capable of both giving someone power and taking it away. Let me explain what I mean by that.
Most fanfiction writers, for example, use pseudonyms. This can be for a number of reasons, but the most commonly expressed fear among writers of fanfiction is that the publication of their real names could have negative consequences in their offline lives. These fears are not unjustified. Not only does fanfiction fall into a legal gray area (though many, like me, would argue it is fair use), but many people are writing stories of a sexual (sometimes pornographic) nature, and there are plenty of instances when knowledge of a person’s involvement in this could lead to disaster. I personally know someone who lost her job when another spiteful fan (who knew her real name) sent a link to her livejournal to her boss. Though my own stories were pretty tame, and I was pretty open about writing them in my offline life, I also used a pseudonym to interact in that world (for my own reasons), and I don’t consider myself a coward for doing so. Openly giving out your full name in that world is inadvisable, and gives power to those who may not use it kindly.
Sometimes, however, a name can give a person power or influence in an online discussion and that power is not always warranted. The folks crying “coward!” in this case, for instance, are all science fiction authors of note, and as such, it is in their best interest to use their real names. After all, nobody can buy your books if they don’t know your name. Their names also give them influence over fans, who may be more easily swayed by someone whose work they admire than by someone they don’t know. I’m not suggesting that this is anyone’s motive for using a real name in an online discussion, but that this can be the effect if the person is well-known among the discussion’s participants. As a celebrity in any circle, it requires care to use your own name without (intentionally or otherwise) dominating or controlling the discussion, and the decision to do so or not I think warrants the same amount of consideration a fan would give to deciding whether or not to use his/her own name online. Names are powerful things, and should be used wisely all around.
All that said, in the end, it really comes down to identity–what your name means to you and how you feel comfortable using it. When I stopped posting in a fannish journal (under my fannish pseudonym) and started posting here instead, it wasn’t because I had suddenly decided to be honest about my identity so that I could be taken seriously in the world. It was really just about leaving one part of my life behind me and moving on to another. Yes, using my real name has made me more aware of what I say and how I say it, and what the consequences of screwing that up could be, but that doesn’t make anything I say now more credible than anything I said before. When I used my fannish pseudonym, it was me. That identity belonged to me–I owned it and cared for it and wasn’t any less my name than the one my parents gave me. Anyone who has participated in online fandom in any significant way knows exactly what I mean. A pseudonym doesn’t make you anonymous, not in that world. It is just an identifier chosen for yourself instead of by somebody else.
I’ve really enjoyed posting here under my real name–bringing my online and offline lives together in a way I hadn’t before. It has been liberating for me in a lot of ways, and has also made me a better writer and a more effective communicator, I think, because I’m so much more conscious of the purpose of my writing. Many of the people I interact with here are using their real names as well, and it definitely removes an element of mystery, which is something I’m enjoying right now, and perhaps something I actually need at this point in my life. Still, while this identity and the world that goes with it feels more tangible to me, it certainly does not seem more credible or real than the online life I led before.
As this blog’s readership is made up pretty evenly of manga bloggers using their real names and LJ-ers using pseudonyms, I’d love to know how other people feel about this. Anyone?
Grace says
March 7, 2009 at 11:07 pmI don’t really understand the big deal about pseuds. If that’s the main name someone uses, then I just think of it as a nickname, whether or not I know their real name. I mean, offline, I have friends who use nicknames. One friend of mine goes by DeeDee, and recently another friend said to me “did you know her real name is such and such?” and when she said that, I was like, oh yeah, I guess I did know that. But if you had asked me two minutes before that what her real name was, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. DeeDee is the name she goes by, the name everyone knows.
Sometimes what people (both in this discussion and elsewhere) refer to as a pseud is not really. An LJ name is not necessarily a pseud, anymore than “eyeballman” is a pseud for Melinda Beasi just because your URL is not melindabeasi.com Thats how I think of kyuuketsukirui and megchan. They are names I picked because it seemed more interesting as a URL than graceanderson (which is common and often taken anyway). But I have always been open about my name, both first and last. With my lyrics site and Digimon site I always went by Grace, even though some people call(ed) me Megchan because of the site. When I started writing fic, I wrote it as Grace. Some archives still have that name (Yuletide), though recently when I’ve signed up for a new archive, I’ve always used kyuuketsukirui because that’s what people know from LJ and I want people to recognise me and click, which they might not as Grace. When I first was using LJ, I used to sign my comments as Grace, because I didn’t want people to think they should call me kyuuketsukirui. I stopped doing that after a while because most of the people I was interacting with knew that was my name, and I never picked it up again. But it still says in my profile, and I do prefer Grace, because I have never thought of kyuuketsukirui or megchan as my name. So I don’t think of them as pseudonyms or nicknames.
Melinda Beasi says
March 7, 2009 at 11:16 pmGah, yes, I totally agree. I mean, everyone has their own standards of privacy online, but even a pseud that is a pseud is just another name for a person, like a nickname or pet name or whatever. I call you Grace, because everyone else always called you Grace (also I have no idea how to say “kyuuketsukirui”) and lots of people called me “Melinda” back when I used my fannish name (except for Aja who still calls me by that name even though she’s known my real name all along, heh). I’ve never tried to be super-private about my name, and anyone who wanted to could certainly have figured it out. I’ve avoided direct links from here to there, but that’s just a effort to discourage people from reading my fanfiction, much of which I now find embarrassing because the early stuff was so bad. Heh.
But to get back to your main point. Yes. a pseudonym is a name just like any other name. I *really* don’t get what kind of point they are trying to make about it.
Ysabet says
March 7, 2009 at 11:22 pmThe pseudonym aspect of the whole situation (which I’ve been following fairly closely) is of particular interest to me as well. I’m not inclined to go into details about my own situation in a public forum—crazy talk, I know!—but I’ve participated in fandom to varying degrees for years, and for a variety of reasons I’ve always done so under my own name.* (I do use a handle on LJ, but it’s not at all hard to match it to my name.)
When I started freelancing in the manga industry I did consider using a different form of my name, but decided that it would be, frankly, more trouble than it was worth to try to keep my “identities” separate. Personally, my position is that I’m a shameless geek, and anyone who knows me on- or offline—which would include hiring me—is going to figure that out pretty quickly. (I am aware that I’m incredibly fortunate to be in a position where it doesn’t particularly matter. I was completely floored by the people in the larger debate who didn’t seem to understand why someone might not want their legal name thrown around publicly. Did they grow up in some alternate world where no one ever warned them about sharing personal information online, or where search engines mysteriously don’t work?)
All that said, my mix of online friends has always included people who use their legal names and people who use pseudonyms, and it never once occurred to me that anyone in the latter group was trying to act anonymously or was concealing their “real” name for some nefarious purpose. People wrote and carried on discussions under the names they’d chosen, and sometimes the rest of us knew their legal names and sometimes we didn’t, and it didn’t matter. It didn’t make their work any less their own, or mean that their opinions carried any less weight (or that they couldn’t be called out for something if need be).
And since I just read Grace’s comment when I was about to post—I agree about thinking of my friends’ online handles as nicknames. There are plenty of people whose legal names crossed my radar years ago, many of whom I’ve spent time with offline, who I still regularly call by their online name. (Sometimes exclusively, sometimes alternated with their legal name.)
*My first name is fairly distinctive, obviously, but even within fandom and writers’ circles I’m not the only one who has it.
Melinda Beasi says
March 7, 2009 at 11:31 pmDid they grow up in some alternate world where no one ever warned them about sharing personal information online, or where search engines mysteriously don’t work?
That made me laugh out loud. RIGHT??
People wrote and carried on discussions under the names they’d chosen, and sometimes the rest of us knew their legal names and sometimes we didn’t, and it didn’t matter. It didn’t make their work any less their own, or mean that their opinions carried any less weight (or that they couldn’t be called out for something if need be).
Yes, EXACTLY. I have not understood at all this suggesting that a pseudonym made someone less credible. It’s not the same thing as posting anonymous flames or something. And the relationships between people using pseudonyms online are no different or less real than those using their legal names online.
When I used a pseudonym, originally it was just the name I signed up with on AOL. Seriously. Also, it is the name of my cat. After a while, I’d used it so much, it felt like *my name*, kind of more than my real one in a lot of ways. Using my real name now is more about getting back in touch with some things I used to like about myself than anything else. It’s complicated. And yeah, not something I want to talk about in detail in a public forum. Heh. But it’s never been about trying to hide my identity in a flame war or something.
Helen Wood says
March 10, 2009 at 1:31 amActually, using a pseudonym that is not linked back to your real name is exactly like posting anonymous flames. If you post things on the assumption that no-one knows who you are, it is just the same as making an anonymous phone call.
Everyone knows I am Helen Wood. All screen names etc that I use and all my LJ names are all openly connected to the name Helen Wood. I don’t troll or take part in cyberbullying and I’m not ashamed of anything I do online, so I don’t feel a need to lie about who I am. If someone identifiable argues some point with me, I will listen, but those who hide who they are, I tend to assume already know they are in the wrong, so why should I respect views they themselves are ashamed of?
Melinda Beasi says
March 10, 2009 at 6:47 amI appreciate your point of view, and thank you for coming by to express it. Though I must say I disagree heartily. You’ve said yourself that there is not such thing as anonymity on the internet. I agree. And I think a person’s use of a single pseudonym over years of online activity is very far from being anonymous, nor is it intended to be so. It is only intended to protect the privacy of that person.
I do have to say that I’m rather insulted by your assertion that anyone posting under a pseudonym online knows they are “in the wrong.” In all the years I posted under a pseudonym, I had many reasons for doing so, but none of them was ever because I thought I was doing something wrong. For instance, during those years, I would not have freaked out if my boss ever found my livejournal (or any of the other zillions of places in which I used the same online name). However, I used my journal both for fandom activity and as a personal journal, and none of that, frankly, was any of her business. Nor should it be. Could she have found that journal if she really wanted to? Certainly. Probably in just a few minutes, even. Could she have found it by simply Googling my real name? No. That was a level of privacy I was comfortable with.
Now that I am using my real name online in this blog, I no longer post anything of a truly personal nature, as I used to in those days, and that’s a condition I have had to become comfortable with in order to be able to do this. At times it feels like a loss, but there have been other gains to balance it out.
I appreciate the fact that you are apparently comfortable with posting everything you do online with a direct link to your real name. However, I feel it’s presumptuous of you to suggest that everyone should be comfortable with that same lack of privacy. People may have personal or work circumstances very different from your own, and there are many perfectly legal activities that could have negative consequences for them either at work or with family and friends. And it’s actually quite insulting to suggest that all these people (which includes almost everyone in every online fandom out there) are doing so because they are ashamed of their activities online. There are many reasons to compartmentalize one’s life in that way, and very few of them have anything to do with shame. I certainly was never ashamed of anything I said or did online under my pseudonym (which I used consistently for almost 15 years, by the way). Some of it was simply not everyone’s business.
I am curious to know, do you feel the same way about professional authors who publish under a pseudonym? Certainly that practice is very old and carried on to this day. Are you assuming that they do so because they are ashamed of their work?
Melinda Beasi says
March 10, 2009 at 9:48 amAlso, no offense, but even knowing your name, “Helen Wood,” gives me very little information about who you actually are. It is not a particularly unusual name, which affords you built-in privacy that some of us can’t possibly achieve. A Google search on my name, for instance, brings up results that are 100% me. If the internet can be believed, I am the only Melinda Beasi who has ever lived. My maiden name was similarly unusual, and I was the only one of those as well. I’ve decided to post under my real name anyway, but with the full knowledge that this gives me absolutely no privacy online whatsoever, which is why it was a decision made with much thought and deliberation. I don’t necessarily expect others to assume the same risk when conversing with me online.
Editing to add: Actually this train of thought has brought up another point in my mind. I think I personally value my level of prolonged interaction with someone online much more than I do knowledge of their personal details. For instance, you and I have never spoken before today, so while I know your name (or at least what you tell me is your name), I have no other basis for judgement about you as a person, whether you are someone I would trust or not, whether we have things in common, etc. This is not a negative statement about you, it is simply fact. I don’t know you.
On the other hand, Flora, who commented later on here is someone who I have interacted with online for several years. I don’t know her real name or the precise details about where she lives or works. However, because I’ve interacted with her for so long, I’ve had the opportunity to witness her behavior with others in the forums in which we mutually interact and we have shared many personal and fandom-related thoughts with each other through our journals, so I actually *do* know her quite well, and ultimately her pseudonym means more to me and contains a much stronger sense of identity for me than your real name does. You, not knowing Flora (I assume), probably would feel differently. You don’t know either of us, so really, neither of our names can mean much to you in a conversation, regardless of which is a legal name and which is a pseudonym. From your comment, I can only assume you would attach more credibility to what *I* say because I am using my real name, but I find that personally perplexing. There are really so many things that make up a person’s identity, on or offline. A name is just one of those things, and not nearly the most important, at least in my experience.
Flora says
March 7, 2009 at 11:45 pmI have many thoughts.
1. My real name is easy, easy, easy for someone who is on my LJ flist to work out. There’s a decent chance that people who share very many friends with me can come up with it in many half an hour if they choose to be reasonably attentive. However, for me, my concern is not so much that someone can work out who Flora is; it’s that I don’t want a casual google of [realname] to bring up teh porn, nor a google of Flora to point people to my real workplace/brother’s website/kids’ pictures. I am totally happy to be consistently Flora as the online identity with which I interact in a given sphere, and in the case where spheres overlap, I am happy to be in charge of who it is I share what with.
2. You may recall I commented recently regarding the issue of identity control and logging in on many blogs. Heh. Also, yes, I agree, when the speaker has some sort of authority over a space, then use of that real name can work out to be abusive of power, too. I recall an incident some years ago, in meatspace, in which a person whose real name was well known and real face was not attempted to get something she legitimately deserved from me without telling me her name (because she is and was the sort of person who is entirely aware that unnecessarily using a name to get something is obnoxious). I was getting it for her when someone else realized who she was, and suddenly everything else in the area stopped so everyone could fall all over themselves. It was sort of fascinating, because even though she was getting what she needed already, the name meant everyone else in the vicinity stopped being served. Anyway, it seems there’s some of that going on in this whole debate as well, where not only are some individuals using their names for bludgeoning, but others who have better needs/points but lesser names are being shunted aside even despite using real names, merely because their names are not as good. Which is stupid.
3. I can’t quite understand why the folks who are all about the real name thing can’t imagine scenarios in which pseudonimity is of value. They are frigging authors of creative fiction. This implies imagination is something they have/value/understand. I can think of like 30 reasons off the top of my head. I know people who have had the custody of their children threatened for *legal behavior* because someone was able to link a pseud to a realname. I am aware of people who have experienced stalking behavior. My realname? If you know it, google it. I guarantee you the result you get is all me. I do not want someone who, for instance, objects to my belief that creative commons licensing is a good thing to decide to find my real name, my real house, and my real kids, and in an environment in which what I say is transmitted immediately and often indiscriminately, I have little control over who reads. I do have (some) control over how easy I make it for a reader to mess up my life.
4. Pseudonymity and Anonymity are just not the same. Clearly many people have need for a pseud, and very very much not because of their fanfic. Why do these folks suppose Open ID exists? People name themselves one place, and carry that name over. They care about that name, in many cases, and claim it places they will never use it in order to help minimize the likelihood someone is masquerading as them. This has nothing to do with trying to behave badly for most, most, most of them, and everything to do with naming oneself. I am in favor of naming of self, where relevant—and I think being required to use someone else’s definition of a legal name in order to be allowed *voice* smacks of some fairly ugly things (not to stretch it toooo far, but one might mention Native/First Nations languages and names being lost because conquering types required their carriers to communicate with our choice of systems)
5. I can call myself Florence Hartzel or Hu’o’u Hue (says the internet; I do not speak Vietnamese and will be very unsurprised to learn that punctuation and spelling etc is imperfect; that would maybe be Deer, Flower). I imagine that in either case, that might be more taken as a real given name than florahart. How the hell these people presume to have any damn idea what constitutes a real name just breaks my brain. I could cheerfully use the name of, say, my internet-ignoring neighbor every time I wanted to say something mean; it would be very difficult to demonstrate this was a falsehood.
So. To sum up: the entire conversation gives me a headache in great big ways, only a few of which are even things I would like to try to learn about and from. BAH.
Melinda Beasi says
March 7, 2009 at 11:55 pm1. Yeah, it was the same with me. Anyone who wanted to could have found out my real name. And now I’m sure anyone reading this who wanted to could figure out my fannish name. But there’s a difference between that and having it easily Google-able to the casual surfer, and it’s a damn big difference.
2. That was extremely well said.
3. I find this astonishing too! Even people who don’t use the internet (especially people who don’t use the internet) know that there are a million good reasons not to give out your real name online. Personally, I think it is willful misunderstanding more than anything else. It benefits them in the argument (in their view) to pretend they don’t understand this. That’s how it looks to the outside observer, anyway.
4. A-freakin’-men.
5. I could cheerfully use the name of, say, my internet-ignoring neighbor every time I wanted to say something mean; it would be very difficult to demonstrate this was a falsehood.
This is so very true. Anyone can sockpuppet. Anyone.
BAH indeed. *sigh*
Helen Wood says
March 10, 2009 at 1:35 amI’ve been stalked for several months in real life, not online. I’ve actually had to go to the police for protection. I still feel no need to conceal who I am.
The simple fact is that no-one is anonymous online. My brother had trouble with an anonymous troll. It took a friend of his five minutes to find out who and where the troll was. If someone wants to stalk you, they’ll manage it, whether or not you conceal your identity.
Estara says
March 8, 2009 at 5:38 amI think any of us who consistently use the same alias all over the internet for whatever reason are ourselves. We usually have a reason – my blog for example also has post about real life and not always complimentary to my pupils or colleagues or even family. I don’t want their input on my blog, though, I just want to grouch around ^^, and maybe have the few of my online acquaintances and real life acquaintances that know that I’m online give some feedback or encouragement or just fellowship.
I’m not a good rpg-player (I don’t subsume into another persona, I create a person that comes close to mine and fits into the storyline), so Estara was me for three years in my first longer contact with internet society in a mmorpg. These days she’s my official persona for almost any internet contact, except some shopping, heh.
Of the few people who read my blog, most are former fellows of that mmorpg, two are real life friends/acquaintances.
I like being Estara, she’s not as pessimistic as the real me, most of the time ^^.
Estara says
March 8, 2009 at 5:45 amoh right, and when I go online for my employer, I also use my real name. I run the school newspaper online and do some online pr in a local community, yup.
Melinda Beasi says
March 8, 2009 at 8:15 amI like being Estara, she’s not as pessimistic as the real me, most of the time ^^.
:D Yes, I think online interaction gives all of us the opportunity to be our best versions of ourselves. Whether we always live up to that or not is another thing (I know I don’t), but we have the opportunity.
jansong@livejournal.com says
March 8, 2009 at 6:25 amWhat a silly silly thing for people to complain about? As if authors haven’t used pseudonyms for years and years and years! And actors! This is the silliest complaint. You’ve all defended yourselves beautifully, but I can’t believe you’ve had to do it.
Melinda Beasi says
March 8, 2009 at 8:16 amIt’s interesting, isn’t it, that it’s a bunch of authors making this argument?
Michael J Pastor says
March 8, 2009 at 2:24 pmHi Melinda!!
How funny that you should write on this topic, nearly 20 years after the only way I was able to have *any* identity on the Internet was as a “guest on Melinda’s account” (as I would sign my netnews.rec.arts.comics posts way back in 91), and now that “Identity 2.0” is part and parcel of what it is I do today with my software ventures.
“pseudonyms” are important, and necessary, and all of the headlines about the embarrassing moments of peoples’ lives intersecting on drunken photos on Facebook should be the obvious warning, but nobody gets it yet. I’m not surprised however, since much of this “social networking” revolution is not being created by people with much sense of “social,” since they’re geeks!
It’s not *appropriate* for all of these social circles to overlap – you don’t make love to your boss like you do your spouse (unless your name is Bill Clinton). I don’t use Facebook for that reason – they attempt to “flatten” and expose my social world by publishing my friend list as public and not differentiating them. I have a profile there, but I don’t use it for anything other than reconnecting with people in my past, and I’d much prefer to use private email and IM to actually communicate.
The real issue here is Personas, and in the Jungian context – the persona being the “mask” that one puts on in appropriate *contexts* – work (work-supervisor, work-supervised), school, play, sex and with the online world, such things as WoW, FanFic, Spore, chat rooms and xtube. It’s a psycho-social phenomenon and mental function that is *necessary* and only causes problems when it becomes so discrete and discreet both that it devolves into Multiple Personaity Disorder – a rare occurance, if it really occurs at all (it’s actually impossible to “prove” that someone is MPD and not just a really good liar or actor of the caliber of Meryl Streep – Queen of Method).
The social world is not flat – one “hill” of one’s social life is going to be higher than another, and they shouldn’t be the same – utopian ideals about one’s reputation and the transparent society be damned. One group’s Utopia is actually a dissident’s dystopia. One’s transparent society is another’s panopticon.
Chances are the ones who are reacting against pseudonyms are the ones who are hurt that you don’t trust them enough to tell them your real name. It’s precisedly reactions like theirs that create the need for pseudonums and Personas online in the first place!
My best to you!
michael j pastor
(no longer a guest on Melinda’s account – but I was damn proud to be one when I was!)
Melinda Beasi says
March 8, 2009 at 4:08 pmMichael, thanks for your insights! It’s insane to me that all that was 20 years ago! We’re so old! *sigh*
Chances are the ones who are reacting against pseudonyms are the ones who are hurt that you don’t trust them enough to tell them your real name. It’s precisedly reactions like theirs that create the need for pseudonums and Personas online in the first place!
You know, I don’t think in this particular case (thought it’s probably true in others) that the people in question are *hurt* not to be trusted with real names, but some of them have certainly proven they *can’t* be trusted with them!
sistermagpie says
March 10, 2009 at 12:23 pmThe simple fact is that no-one is anonymous online. My brother had trouble with an anonymous troll. It took a friend of his five minutes to find out who and where the troll was. If someone wants to stalk you, they’ll manage it, whether or not you conceal your identity.
I don’t know the circumstances there, but that is someone being an anonymous troll rather than what people are calling a pseudonym, I assume. But regardless, that’s not the only reason to use a pseud online (because you think it makes you immune to stalkers or ever being discovered).
In my case, I come from the opposite direction—I think it’s odd to use your real name. I don’t think it says anything bad about the person, obviously, but I would have to have a good reason to use my real name rather than a reason not to use it. There are many jobs, for instance, where it’s not a good idea to have someone googling your name and connecting things about you with the place at which you work. For instance, I’m not ashamed of anything I say online, but, as they say on DVDs, “opinions expressed in this commentary do not represent the opinions of [X thing of which you are a fan].
I think there’s probably a lot of different things that go into making the choice. Things in your job, things about what you’re doing on line, your family, your personality. But it would never occur to me that because somebody’s using an obvious pseudonym they were automatically wrong or had something to hide. In fact, I remember one conversation where I had forgotten to log into my pseud before writing and so was truly anonymous. The person replied by saying they didn’t see why they should answer since I wasn’t “brave enough” to be logged in. So I did log in, explained I had done that by accident, but had to ask what I had possibly said that carried more weight when I was logged in since I was making a logical point.
Ideas should often be able to stand on their own. In some conversations in the recent discussions it seemed like people had a disturbing desire to make everything ad hominem, ignoring what someone said in favor of finding some “fact” they could tell from their ISP (while still claiming not to know how search engines work) that proved their opinion didn’t count.
Melinda Beasi says
March 10, 2009 at 1:09 pmI remember one conversation where I had forgotten to log into my pseud before writing and so was truly anonymous. The person replied by saying they didn’t see why they should answer since I wasn’t “brave enough” to be logged in. So I did log in, explained I had done that by accident, but had to ask what I had possibly said that carried more weight when I was logged in since I was making a logical point.
That’s a very good point. I think often that person’s argument is used simply to avoid having to admit that someone has made a logical point that puts their own argument into question. It’s a lot easier to question someone’s credibility than it is to admit you might be wrong.
You’re right, ideas should stand on their own.