4.20.2005
On blogging anonymously
A lot of professors at my university have non-anonymous blogs on which they discuss a range of topics, including those on which they actually have expertise. I imagine there's a certain audience synergy there; I'm sure it gives them more readership both inside and outside the university.
But, obviously, there are certain things one can't talk about it in a blog like that. I'm not trying very hard to conceal my identity, and if someone wanted to they could figure it out pretty easily. Yet somehow I do feel this gives me license to talk about certain things I wouldn't otherwise. (Maybe not quite as openly as I would if I knew this were a TOTALLY anonymous medium.)
Like, say, this. I've been thinking lately a lot about the notion (not my idea) that when the political situation gets really bad, really horrendously bad, as one feels one has less and less to lose, when no kind of practical change seems possible, then all of a sudden the impractical seems less impossible. One is free to imagine all sorts of things, because hell, it can't get any worse, can it? (That in itself may be utopian.) But could have the potential to be oddly empowering. I've mostly been thinking of this in terms of the American political situation writ large. But it just came to me tonight that I may have begun to think this way about my job. And that that might not be such a bad thing.
But, obviously, there are certain things one can't talk about it in a blog like that. I'm not trying very hard to conceal my identity, and if someone wanted to they could figure it out pretty easily. Yet somehow I do feel this gives me license to talk about certain things I wouldn't otherwise. (Maybe not quite as openly as I would if I knew this were a TOTALLY anonymous medium.)
Like, say, this. I've been thinking lately a lot about the notion (not my idea) that when the political situation gets really bad, really horrendously bad, as one feels one has less and less to lose, when no kind of practical change seems possible, then all of a sudden the impractical seems less impossible. One is free to imagine all sorts of things, because hell, it can't get any worse, can it? (That in itself may be utopian.) But could have the potential to be oddly empowering. I've mostly been thinking of this in terms of the American political situation writ large. But it just came to me tonight that I may have begun to think this way about my job. And that that might not be such a bad thing.
