anonymous

When I started this blog, I didn't bother to make it anonymous. You can look at the username I used for it, the identifying information that I posted. Heck, in my first post I gave everyone a decent snapshot of my life.

I shared a few of the paragraphs I had written with a friend, because I liked the way I'd strung certain phrases together. And he asked me, "Is this public?" I told him that of course it was, I had nothing to hide, it was just for class. He pointed out a few things, how easy it was, even though I'd been vague, to piece together exactly who and what I was talking about in some places. He was right, and it wasn't information that I intended to make public.

I made one change very quickly. Search engines can no longer index this blog. Yes, some of them still have an archive, and will until stuff gets re-crawled, (search engines are fascinating!) but for the most part, this blog is a lot easier to find unless you have a link to it, which is entirely possible for the people in this class, but a lot less likely for the internet as a whole.

I am pretty open in this blog. The consequence is that I'm limiting the number of people that have easy access to it as much as possible. And that's not necessarily a good thing. Writing on the internet has a lot of advantages: it's easy to share, it's easy to provide links to other relevant things. It's easy to become relevant to someone who had no idea that you exist.

But it's hard to be completely honest. And I'm not. I talked about this in an earlier post. I'm not completely honest even though I've done some amount of locking my blog down to the general public. I might be completely honest if no one was reading this, but if I'm being completely honest, I wouldn't be writing this if no one was reading it.

I've got another journal out there on the interwebs, and that one is a hell of a lot more anonymous. And a lot more public. I'm pretty sure that any of you could read it and you would have no idea for one second that it was me. I'm a lot more honest there. Emotionally open and such. And I'm a lot less honest too, because nobody who reads that blog has any idea of where I go to school, or what classes I take. Heck, while they could probably figure out that I lived in the United States, that's about all the location-narrowing they could do. And the only reason they might guess that my name doesn't start with a 'Z' is because very few peoples' do.

I guess what I'm saying here is that there's a tradeoff between being open and honest and being publicly identified. I think a lot of the biggest gains from the internet come from the freely-sharing of ideas and crossing of communication boundaries and the raw honesty that someone can share when nobody knows who they are. I think the biggest losses from the internet come from the lack of honest, personal connection from people that comes when nobody knows who you are.

This blog has a little of both. I'm real, I'm a real person, who all know who I am. Maybe not everything about me, but something. At that both means that what I write means more to you than some random stranger, and that what I write is a lot more guarded because it's attached to my name.

I don't think there's a "best way to deal" with this, because I think it's one of those trade-offs that you can't get around. What's the best way to deal with having an awesome car and actually having money? Decide which is more important to you or win the lottery.

Best way to deal with being open in the internet age? Decide what's important to you early on, or stay off the internet.