In the blogosphere no one knows your name

A lot of major political figures (and by political figures I don't mean just the elected ones) are just now learning about the blogosphere for the first time. And they are finding it disconcerting. The biggest complaint I hear is that they don't like anonymous postings.

First an aside. My posts are not anonymous and I have still found some many people I ding get very upset. The underlying issue to them seems to be how dare some random person be able to have a significant impact on the public conversation. Blogging changes the game and opens the public conversation to a much larger number of people. And that is threatening to those in position of power because a change means their position is threatened.

But now lets discuss the subject of anonymity. I would prefer that everyone in the blogosphere went by their real name. But depending on the forum it ranges from everyone is known to most people are not known. And that seems to be the nature of the Internet – that a lot of these forums will be mostly anonymous. So it’s one of those things that it doesn’t do much good to try and change.

But what I have also found is that over time you come to recognize the regular contributors by their handle. And in most cases knowing their name adds nothing because they’re not someone you ever met or know of. There’s about 20 – 30 of us who are regular bloggers on ColoradoPols that post very regularly and we all “know” each other and the less regular posters “know” all of us. But I don’t think knowing their name would increase my knowledge of them at all. And they do know my real name but I don’t think that adds much to their knowledge of me other than to tease me about having a Republican mom.

With all that said, I have also found the fact that I put my name up buys me up-front credibility. I have seen many posts replying to others saying that their disagreeing with me would carry more weight if they would sign their name too. It’s not that people know me, just that they know I list my real name. Plus there are the occasional soccer & basketball parents who read it and then give me a hard time at games which keeps me a bit more in line.

I think how this all works is jarring for those who are new to it. And because up till now all "speakers" in the public stage were known, and they all generally had met and know each other. This is especially jarring for lawyers because in the law they work in a world where there is a predisposition to full disclosure. This is more like a political discussion in a bar.

But all in all, I really like it. It’s not perfect and it has it’s good and bad points. But it’s alive and vibrant and incredibly wide-ranging. It’s why more younger people get their news from The Daily Show than the nightly news.

And I think this is healthy. What we have now is actually very similar to what existed during the founding of our country. Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, etc all started newspapers using shell companies, wrote articles using pseudonyms, and tore into each other as bad as we see happening now at the national level. The only difference is they used the printed page. But we are following in their footsteps.

And they managed to do a good job in that environment.