Keep it to yourself

Among the frequent themes on the writers’ (and occasionally readers’) blogs is anonymity. And with good reason: writing a blog is essentially an exercise in maintaining a public anonymous side while maintaining a private personal side. Perhaps one of the more interesting things to do is to see how different writers and readers approach their respective blogs. Thanks to the glorious tab-browsing abilities of Firefox, I can pull up all the blogs I like to read every day and see if they have any updates. (This is a pretty big list anymore; I have more tabs for blogs than I do for comics; about 20 in all.) As I read the blogs, there is quite a variety of anonymity. Uffish Thought, for example, won’t even reveal his or her gender. Duchess, on the other hand, tells where she’s from, where she works, her sibs’ nicknames, etc. Some people write philosophical diatribes, some write funny experiences, and some write about whatever sticks in their mind. And some people write crap that shouldn’t even be shared, much less published on the Internet. (Geez, people, keep that crap to yourself.)

So what’s my approach to anonymity? I’d say probably somewhere in the midrange, with some leanings towards the paranoid. The alias game is really very fun to play, and I’d hate to lose that fun aspect of Board writing. But it’s still fun to share small tidbits of non-specific personal information in order to tell amusing stories. I guess I’m just not willing to put any vaguely personal information online, just as a general rule. I think that’s part of how the Internet works—you can’t really trust anything online. Like when a site wants you to register with an e-mail address—do you ever put your real address down? No way, you use a throw-away account that you keep just for this very purpose. Otherwise you’ll be getting spammed like mad before you can even reach your inbox. Sometimes it comes straight from the provider. Last time I registered for a Hotmail account (a few years ago) I had 10 porn solicitations waiting for me when I first logged in, and it got worse from there. Needless to say, I no longer use Hotmail. But it taught me a valuable lesson, so I don’t put anything personal online. It’s just good policy—keep it to yourself. And to quote Max from one of my favorite movies, “Anonymity . . . is like a warm blanket.”