A case of identity
We were talking around the house this morning about verified online identities. Apparently this came up in recent conversation with Nikki Haley. I understand that she is in favor of such things, for which she received significant blowback. Be that as it may, we found online identities to be an interesting and thorny question.
One the one hand, if you feel compelled to give voice to your opinion, should you not also feel confident standing behind it with your legal name?
I’m not speaking about advice columns and the like where anonymity is generally understood as a good and serves to provide cover for those who may not want their personal dilemmas to be publicly pinned to them. We’ve all see those pieces about about family members or exes showing up at holidays, etc., and that are signed with glib little bylines: “Troubled at Turkey Time.”
No, instead the question is around serious, decidedly public matters that affect the community: laws, tax codes, statues, ordnances, discussions on trade and foreign relations. Perhaps if your real name were pinned to your opinion, folks might—might—take a breath and be a little more thoughtful and choose their words a little more carefully, in service not only to themselves but to those also in the conversation.
Of course there is also a longstanding tradition of being able to voice opinions anonymously online born from long historical tradition. Currer Bell was the name used by Charlotte Brontë as a means to get her work published in a time when female writers weren’t taken seriously. That dynamic, unfortunately, is still in play today. As are concerns for safety. How honest and forthright can you be in a conversation when your opinion may imperil your material or personal well being? Or that of your family?
No answers emerged in our chat, but the concept of trust and forgiveness did. In times past and in places where democracy was lauded, opinions were given voice by folks who you actually knew and interacted with regularly. You may show up to the meeting hall and have a huge row with Bob or Jean, but you were still likely to buy your eggs or milk from them later that day or week. And you also likely knew more of what was going on with them generally. Oh Bob is such as ass at the end of the month. . . . Jean is so short when her relatives are in town. You can build trust and rapport with people that you know and engage with regularly. You can know their foibles and strengths. And even if you think their opinion on this or that is pure shite, you could still think they were okay and mostly happy to have them as a neighbor. Doing that with the whole of a large community is not realistic, to say nothing of a state, nation, or the whole world.
For us the question evolved into one more generally about engaging with people in communities that are fluid and boundless and how that is in many ways at odds with how such business has been conducted in the past. Establishing bona fides seems like a good idea, but how best to implement it seems murkier to me right now.