Anonymity and pseudonymity

Granted, electronic mail and news both encourage authorship and some degree of permanence (particularly for mail), but these media are also quite similar to tradition print media, with the different that the net encourages many-to-many interactions more similar to conversations, but more manageable when there are a large number of people involved, due to the non-real-time nature of the interaction.

On the other hand, media that really take advantage of the many-to-many, real-time aspects of the network, such as MUDs and IRC, are almost never attributed to the true name of the individuals involved (although reputations associated with pseudonyms are very common). There are some interesting historical precedents for this; for instance, MUDs originated from more fantasy-oriented games where role-playing was the norm (including taking on a name appropriate for the given archetype one is playing), whereas IRC tended to share a CB-radio ethos in which trucker's handles were the obvious form of address. Nonetheless, it is remarkable how often such anonymous forms of address seem to crop up.

Since authorship is so often disguised in these media, they are ripe for experiments in gender-bending and Turing tests---not to mention socially undesirable behavior, such as rape and other deviant behavior. Yet they otherwise share more of the characteristics of conversational media than they do those of "texts" and the sorts of analysis (such as reader-response theory [1 2 3 4 5]) that tend to emphasize fixed texts have a great deal of trouble analyzing such forms, though they do tend to treat the reading of such "texts" as a more collaborative effort (more akin to a conversation) than approaches that assume that there is one particular meaning to a text that all readers will see.

In electronic media in which attribution is generally the rule, such as mail and news, anonymous or pseudonymous speech is often political or commercial in intent. For example, those individuals who publish information deemed unflattering to the Scientologists are routinely harrassed; the Scientologists are also pursuing more global laws against anonymous expression to try to bolster their ability to control free expression on the net. In the commercial arena, people often resort to spamming all possible newsgroups with a commercial message; most of these are deliberately anonymous to avoid a massive, retaliatory community response to the perpetrators. (Of course, most commercial speech of this sort eventually yields some sort of identification, since it is difficult to sell things on a large scale anonymously.)

Back to Contents