Unused and Probably Unusable

Thanks for commenting.

(Apologies if the following's blunt; I'm deliberately recasting your question as if it were a personal attack, rather than a declaration of your own feelings. Be assured, there are never any hard feelings for any reasonable comment)

Why does blogging discomfort you? Do billboards? What about radio, newspapers, or people speaking into bullhorns in public parks?

If communication required face-to-face non-anonymous interaction, would we have gotten to the stage of epistles, let alone e-mail?

In the pen-and-paper age, a scholarly debate between people on different continents took ages, perhaps weeks or months for a single exchange in the debate. When letters had to cross the Atlantic (or even further...) in order to reach the other party, communication was slow and expensive.

Today, the cost of storage is approximately zero cents per word, correct to several significant digits.

The cost of communication is roughly zero, or rather it is a sunk cost for most people who own computers or have access to the internet.

The cost of _time_ has changed radically. The canonical standard, "How long does it take someone to earn enough to buy a loaf of bread?", is now almost meaningless. Now the question is, how hard do I have to work, and for how long, in order to secure my future? Reading or writing blogs obviously involves a time commitment, and that comes straight out of either productivity or leisure time (which we as modern humans have an inordinate amount of).

Blogging, unlike journaling, is an act of two-way communication - or even more. Journaling is like putting your thoughts on a wall in graffiti. You may get links, there may be conversations, but I'm not sure communication is the point. Not two-way communication, I mean. There's a Live Journal community, or rather a whole galaxy of communities, clusters, many of which overlap. Similarly, the Blawgosphere in my view is not an echo chamber but rather a community of ideas-and-thinkers, most of whom do _not_ agree on methods, meanings, or outcomes, which gives feedback.

Echo chambers give feedback, and usually converge to a single point of view. This turns what could be soi-disant "mental masturbation," a pointless and self-absorbed intellectual activity, into the group version of the same, in which self-congratulatory plaudits circle in a swimming pool of ideas masquerading as an ocean. That particular kind of gene pool of intellectual biology is viciously inbred, with the obvious resulting flaws.

Blogging, much like opening one's mouth, is an expression of ego: what comes out is your thoughts, your words. And yet, what is it, to hyperlink?

What does it mean to intentionally create a forum for widely disparate thinkers to engage in a scholarly topic? What is this, this blawging?

As far as anonymity or pseudonymity being dishonorable, I can only interpret that as a suggestion about my own choice of identity. There is less honor in offering up one's privacy and identity to the world, I think, than you imply.

Earning the audience's respect for one's ideas and quality of expression is paramount to a blogger. We live or die, as sources of amusement or education or persuasive argument, by our reputations. All we have, is what we say. It does not matter if I have a PhD (I don't), or where I am (Philadelphia), or what I look like. As they say, On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. What does matter is who and what I am: an anonymously blogging lawyer who is responsible to his audience.

I don't really agree with your thesis. I would direct your attention to the Wikipedia article on Anonymity, which notes in part,

Attempts at anonymity are not always met with support from society. There is a trend in society to mistrust someone who makes an effort to maintain their anonymity. This is often summed up in the statement, "You wouldn't want to stay anonymous unless you had something to hide." The implication is that there is no legitimate reason to obscure one's identity from the world as a whole. Many countries (including the United States) have made attempts to increase the difficulty of maintaining anonymity, such as through the proposed introduction of national identification cards.

I'll have more to write about blogging and its ethical and linguistic and social implications over time, but this anonymity thing is right up front and center, and must be addressed.

Do I have a right to be anonymous? Does it matter that I choose to be? Why do I do it? What does that imply about my writing, if anything? About my ideas?

I can only suggest the following answers:

- You bet I have a right to be anonymous
- It does matter, if it matters to you the reader. But it doesn't to all my readers; mainly just my harshest critics, who in a fit of anger at my _words_ demand that I unmask so that I can be challenged more directly - and personally. But it doesn't _matter_ who I am if I'm wrong, and it doesn't matter who I am if I'm right. So, let the words speak for themselves, and I'll be held accountable, at this blawg and through this identity, which is neither a straw man nor a sock puppet.
- I choose anonymity because it keeps life simpler. Instead of being a publicly known lawyer/blogger, I am a publicly knowable (but likely unknown, except to friends and colleagues and opposing counsel) lawyer and a blawgospherically known blogger, who is anonymous (or rather, pseudonymous) but identifiable as such.
- My anonymity suggests nothing whatsoever about my writing to me. I think I have the courage of my convictions, but I do not care to have happen to me what has happened to Anita Hill, Cindy Sheehan, Monica Lewinsky, Jen Armstrong (mentioned in the post, above), Michael Schiavo, or Michael Newdow. By doing what they did, which was generally a matter of trying to live their lives as they saw fit, they became something else.

They were injected, in some but not all of the above cases against their will or desire, into public discourse. As a result, their lives were forever altered, and they were turned into household names, smeared by their detractors on talk radio and at breakfast counters across the country.

I don't need to be a public figure. I just want to be involved in public discourse. I am a private citizen who wishes to have a public voice. Is this illegitimate? I take as my model not the Federalist papers, by "Publius," collectively Hamilton, Madison and Jay, but rather the pseudonymous siblings of Ender Wiggin in Orson Scott Card's excellent Ender's Game.

Lacking power or status themselves, Peter and Valentine Wiggin became "Demosthenes" and "Locke" on the nets, Card's image of what would supplant chat rooms and newsgroups: a blog by any other name.

The siblings would release thoughtful or emotional or otherwise persuasive diatribes, and then watch the results. Sometimes they would respond to each other. These "children," these highly aware and highly persuasive writers, became respected for their thoughts and words, not for their ages or positions. Soon, their reputations _became_ positions of power. Eventually, those who needed to know their real identities, knew, and it did not matter.

Again, thanks for responding. I hope others find this discussion illuminating, or at least interesting.