And since there are more journals than a human can read, and we don't all write for the same area of inquiry, the odds that I know who you are and where you publish are small (unless you have made Norman Mailer status in the field and become the next Gerry Graff or John Guillory or whoever).
But if the open source advocates and rah rah creative commons folks had their way, would these anonymous folks still want to be anonymous?
"NO! We don't fear repercussions for our academic work! There is nothing for us to fear when we write about X novel, X poem, X composition moment, X…."
Really? Why not? Is it because our academic ideas are "safe" and our desire to document the untold story of Plezure is "unsafe?" Is academic writing always so safe that no one gets upset when they read recent scholarship? Tell that to James Sledd. Tell that to VV. A moment for ideological reflection, no? Academic work is supposed to be "safe?" I think I hear the ghost of Berlin about to land and say a thing or two about writing and being safe.

If I think about and try to consider working with what non-academic writers do with the medium (like change the nature of archiving, document forgotten moments, etc) is that "unsafe?" Is blogging unsafe at any speed?

Listen: I wish access was different. I don't know if it would change the anonymous fear, but I do know, that out of my published writings, the one I wish was taken seriously and which could provoke a mass audience ain't this little InsideHigherEd thing. In the last couple years, I've published a few pieces I hoped folks would get irked about, or think about, or respond to. But nada has happened. Only the online pieces get attention. I wish I could upset someone with my academic work. At best, I hear a yawn - maybe because of quality, but also likely because probably half a dozen people read that stuff.

Fear of retribution is not our problem. Access, I can't believe I am saying this, is.

Posted by New Kid on the Hallway @ 02/24/2006 02:21 PM EST

Bb, nice anonymonormativity in lacking the guts to sign your troll.

Posted by cbd @ 02/24/2006 02:07 PM EST

Jenny, even graffitists participate in public discourse.

Jonathan, nice heteronormativity in rushing to Clancy's defense.

Posted by Bb @ 02/24/2006 01:53 PM EST

A couple of points:

1) It's true that the blog of Clancy Ratliff is insufficently "me"-centered. That is, it is lacking in content that promotes my work and the general importance of my ideas. I have mentioned this on several occasions.

2) In the continued spirit of amused pedantry: let's "critique" pure reason or similar and criticize (or carp at) fellow academics. This applies universally.

3) About access: Your domain, many of the blogs having this conversation, and insidehighered.com could be gone from the face of the earth in five years, with only an incomplete web archive--if that--left of them. An article in a scholarly journal, particularly one with print component, has much greater persistence. (Has anyone read Memoirs Found in a Bathtub?)

Posted by Jonathan @ 02/24/2006 12:27 PM EST

Hold on a minute.
I'm absoultely not angry. None of this bothers me.
My point is that you all are so upset and angry over....over....over...a critique of "serious blogging" that put three items together:
1. Tribble
2. A Forbes article
3. Pseudonymous/anonymous blogging.

And that deserves being called an "ass" or that you all rush to believe someone who has a grudge against me and my partner for not wanting that person to post here and on her blog for reasons unknown to you?

Petty, yes. That is petty.

Posted by Jeff @ 02/24/2006 12:27 PM EST

Well, for what it's worth, I don't claim to control what commenters say on my blog. Though I take full responsibility for a post that encouraged that kind of tone. But I don't see how a series of petty comments on a blog are the same as "acts of revenge" - I just think the latter is a sort of melodramatic way to characterize a bunch of bitching. Clearly they've made you angry, but you know, your post about Stewgad (which you haven't really acknowledged) made me angry too.

As for good - okay, I shouldn't have put "good" in quotation marks, that was misleading. And experiment isn't the same as play. So sorry to mischaracterize that (comes from writing too quickly).

In any case, I've just posted another comment on this at my blog, which, I promise entails no name-calling, and I think no insults, though of course you'd be in a better position to judge what you'd consider insulting.

Posted by New Kid on the Hallway @ 02/24/2006 12:22 PM EST

Yo to Crazy:
Yes to exchange.
Yo to Kid:
Never did I say "good" or "bad." I encouraged looking at ways which are emerging with the emerging Web and emerging practice of blogging.
Thus - the call to experiment (which is not always "play").

"Are you suggesting that pseudonymous bloggers have some kind of network going where they blackball the brave named bloggers they don't like?"

Read the comments on your blogs. Petty? Yes.

Posted by Jeff @ 02/24/2006 11:44 AM EST

Jeff, I have apologized for any and all ways in which I might have insulted you. I did so sincerely, and I think that you will notice from the tone of my comments here and from what I've said on my blog since communicating with you directly that I have tried to move this discussion to a place where we're engaging with each others' ideas about blogging. Seriously.

That said, I honestly don't understand how I've proved your point about pseudonymity being about fear. And I don't see how you've engaged with the substance of my comment, which actually was meant to try to participate in the discussion that your article inspires.

Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean that I'm vengeful, insulting, or attacking. I'm not saying that some of my comments, prior to communicating with you directly, were the most mature responses to your piece in IHE. Again, I apologize for those hot-headed and poorly considered responses. At any rate, I understand your defensiveness in response to those things that were said, but I really would like it if we could move this discussion to a place where you actually respond to some of the points that those on the opposite side of this ideological divide are making. Of course, this is your blogspace and you don't need to do that if you don't want to, but I think that the discussion could be interesting, and it's a discussion that's worth having. If you're game, I'm game.

Posted by Dr. Crazy @ 02/24/2006 11:34 AM EST

Well, Jeff, my point is that as a pseudonymous blogger, I see little difference between trashing your article as lame and your trashing Stewgad's post about teaching as lame. I'll admit mine was mean-spirited if you'll admit that yours was too. Sorry, but I just don't buy that having the "courage" to write under your own name absolves you from the charge of mean-spiritedness.

And no, my response is not about my "fear" of blogging. My response is annoyance with someone who characterizes what I do based on an unrepresentative sample of posts linked by IHE. Moreover, you said your piece was about academic blogging and therefore if I don't consider myself part of that, I shouldn't be offended; but what you characterize as "academic" blogging is the blogging community to which I participate (that's where your examples come from), so my objection is to how you characterize that community. I think your approach to what we're trying to do is limiting.

My tone may have been snarky, but I think I did identify at least one point of critique in my original response: that you characterize what "good" blogging can be, and disassociate any pseudonymous blogging with that, when in fact many pseudonymous bloggers are consciously trying to think about some of the things that you praise as important in blogging.

Anyway, yes, Jeff, some of my comments about you - on my own blog and on Dr. Crazy's - were less than scholarly. I don't think my comments to you here have been inappropriate, and I don't think you've really answered them.

I'd also love to know what you mean by "acts of revenge." Someone writes something, people disagree with it, they speak their mind. Are you suggesting that pseudonymous bloggers have some kind of network going where they blackball the brave named bloggers they don't like?

Posted by New Kid on the Hallway @ 02/24/2006 11:20 AM EST

Ah ha! And Karen has gotten my point exactly. There is a healthy dose of ego whether anonymous or not. I wonder if this has more to do with people's reactions to Jeff's article and Jeff's reaction to those reactions than we are acknowledging.

Just food for thought.

Posted by "Amy" @ 02/24/2006 10:52 AM EST

The blog entries of Jeff Rice, Jenny Edbauer, Clancy Ratliff--to name a few--often read to me as self-serving me-me-me fests than a contribution to public discourse.

Holy cow. How did I get pulled into this discourse? I never billed my blog as a contribution to public discourse. I never billed it as anything, in fact. I started blogging a few years ago just to get in the writing habit every day. As I was writing my diss, i wanted an outlet for just fun, pointless, wandering rambles.

Geez. You people can really suck the life out of something, can't you? I love it when the hammer of "public discourse" is used to beat others over the head with. Same as the "critical" hammers, "social" hammers, and all the rest.

My gods, Amy. Let go of that fundamentalist cliche bag you're holding.

Posted by jenny e. @ 02/24/2006 10:51 AM EST

Sounds like you're stroking your own ego there, "Amy."

Posted by Karen @ 02/24/2006 10:43 AM EST

At least with anonymous blogging, there is an absence of the blog as self ego-stroking (look at me; aren't I clever), overt manipulation of possible readers in an effort to "get" something (hiring committees), and networking that quite frankly reeks of trying to get ahead through who you know rather than what you do.

The blog entries of Jeff Rice, Jenny Edbauer, Clancy Ratliff--to name a few--often read to me as self-serving me-me-me fests than a contribution to public discourse.

Posted by Amy @ 02/24/2006 10:32 AM EST

What I

Posted by Amy @ 02/24/2006 10:29 AM EST

Not really. I think you all proved the paranoia point well. You still do. I stand by what I wrote and would welcome discourse about that, not about my partner, a disgruntled visitor to this space, my being an ass, or whatever.

Posted by Jeff @ 02/24/2006 09:36 AM EST

I don't think that New Kid is saying that she's not an "academic blogger" but rather that she does not consider her blog a professional document (which, incidentally, is exactly what I said in my comment). NK and I both blog as academics. We blog about teaching, doing research, attempting to negotiate professional and personal lives. In citing the "academic bloggers" that you do who do not write with their professional names, like Angry Professor and La Lecturess, you cite a similar kind of blog, one that is about BEING an academic but NOT about their academic work in a conventional "please evaluate me for tenure based on this document" sense. The point is that you seem to be saying that an "academic blog" should be able to be evaluated through the professional identity of the author. I think what many pseudonymous bloggers are experimenting with is creating a writing voice that is outside of that professional identity but that still interrogates issues about the profession.

Re: things said/not said in my comments. Again, I will say that I think anything that I have said came out of the fact that I was used in the service of an argument with which I did not agree and that my position was misrepresented. I'm not saying it was pretty or nice or whatever, but I think that one of the things about the blogging medium is that comments can become petty or insulting or whatever. In other words, it goes with the territory. And I suppose I don't see it as a "personal attack" because I don't know you, whatever your name on your blog. Ultimately, the name on the blog is a name under which you are collecting a bunch of writing. You have a writing persona, but I would never claim to know who you are or what you think. The "you" on your blog, I would contend, is no more authentic than the "me" over at Dr. Crazy.

And perhaps that gets to the heart of why people responded to that part of your article so vehemently: I think that you seem to characterize the choice to use a pseudonym as ultimately inauthentic and so pressured as to be useless. You characterize those who make this choice as "hiding behind" a pseudonym out of some sort of deep paranoia or terror at being discovered. I think that what you would find, were you to read more widely and deeply across blogs that do this, is that your sense of them fails to recognize the different and specific things that each of these writers is doing and that it fails to acknowledge the ways in which this kind of writing is, in fact, interesting and enjoyable and - yes - even worth considering in the context of "academic blogging."

Posted by Dr. Crazy @ 02/24/2006 08:10 AM EST

Uh...New Kid..the behavior is a lot different. Your responses are not to the content of the piece but to your own fears about blogging. Lots of personal attacks, no attacks on the overall piece. When I critique, I focus on the idea, not the person's personality or his partner. I would welcome critique and discussion over the main point - the potential of the new medium. The piece is very explicit about not being about a pro/con anonymous debate. I placed being anonymous in a larger context. I don't care if you object to that. Please do. But your reponses are hardly academic or professional. They are more at the personal attack level. I don't think it was me being "naive," as you put it. The knee jerk responses have more to say about other issues than my short piece.

And it was about academic blogging, so if you don't consider yourself part of that, then you shouldn't have an issue with it.

For folks worried about retribution, you spend much time hiding behind anonymity in order to enact your own kind of revenge. The only acts of revenge I ever see come from anonymous bloggers.

I think John Walter made the point nicely in the commnets of one blog. I did not say "my way" is the only way. Quite the opposite. Your quote shows that. And I didn't side with Tribble. Since you are using my search to find old posts, search for what I wrote on Tribble when it came out.

Posted by Jeff @ 02/24/2006 06:51 AM EST

With all due respect, how are the comments that some anonymous bloggers have made about your in their comments different from, for instance, your post sniggering at one of Stewgad's posts (at Pretty Hard, Dammit) about teaching, where you made fun of the lack of pedagogical value in such a post? (My apologies for not linking to the post, I found it when I was searching "anonymity" here, but I find your lack of archives difficult to negotiate.) Is it somehow less mean-spirited just because you post under a "real" name and I don't? I don't think you can say it's only because you're accountable for what you say and, for instance, I as a pseudonymous blogger am not, because I'm part of an online community in which I *am* accountable for what I say. Now, I may not be accountable in an academic, professional sense, but one of the points I keep wanting to make in response to your IHE post is that my blogging is NOT an academic, professional endeavor. It often addresses academia, but it is NOT academic work. Therefore the issue that you raise with anonymous blogging in terms of being able to evaluate the, what, I guess legitimacy of the writer? isn't really relevant.

(I should add that this isn't all intended to say that you shouldn't have made the post about Stewgad's post - it's your blog, you can post what you like, none of us have to read it. Similarly, you don't have to read any of ours. I just don't think the behavior's all the different.)

FWIW, I do believe that the IHE column comes across suggesting that there is in fact something wrong with blogging anonymously. Your points about the potential that blogging can offer are good ones, but I do think a number of people saw the post as saying that we should "blog like you." I think it's slightly naive, in the wake of the Tribble affair, to claim that this response is unreasonable. When you say, That was just one point; being anonymous belongs to a larger movement of heavy-handed approaches to a new medium I don't see how you can argue that's not a criticism, by inherently equating blogging anonymously with heavy-handedness. You're certainly not saying it's the only way to be heavy-handed, but this does suggest that it's impossible to be anonymous without being heavy-handed, and I think that's something that anonymous bloggers object to, as it generalizes terribly about what anonymous bloggers do.

As for your post here - I don't think the issue about access at all (although I agree that access and the ways that blogging offers to make it easier, is definitely an issue for blogging in general). I think it is about subject matter - about discussing material that doesn't easily fit the public/private divide, and yes, that this can be more difficult for women to negotiate than men. You're certainly right that not all academic writing is "safe," by no means; but I'd argue that most people's considerations for that kind of writing are different than for writing blog posts.

Posted by New Kid on the Hallway @ 02/23/2006 11:06 PM EST

The Cervantes/Rousseau section was my favorite part too, and I got what you were getting at. I haven't mentioned it before, I don't think, but I thought it was a great piece.

And I don't really understand what's got people so pissed off. It's not like you've argued everyone should blog like you. You're pointing out the potentials, the possibilities, blogging has to offer, and you're suggesting people might want to think about the potentialities of new media instead of just replicating traditional practices.

I wouldn't have thought that was such a dangerous idea. Apparently, it is.

And the whole anonymous issue...I've got a pseudonymous LiveJournal blog and I'm a member of a number of LJ communities, both academic and nonacademic. The thing is, even in the LJ academic forums, I'm fully aware that I have a very different ethos than I do on a listserv or in my non-anonymous blogging. And on LJ, if I critique an idea, I don't use names or link to anything because I don't think its ethical to attack directly someone while using a pseudonym.

It's easy to be nasty when you're free from accountability. But I digress. Any way, the irony is well noted.

Posted by John @ 02/23/2006 08:15 PM EST

Well - the "stopped blogging" part is obviously an error on my part. Sorry for that.
The university and pedagogy are obviously gender-biased - we have a history of women reduced to low status and inferior roles in our profession.
We may, however, disagree on how to respond to that. You believe in the need for a pseudonym. I don't. I don't fault you; I merely offer another kind of response - one which takes a short form b/c of the format of IHE and similiar outlets.

The "insulting" remark is not what you write here - but how you all attack me at the level of my personality in your comments section.

Posted by Jeff @ 02/23/2006 04:09 PM EST

Hey there,
Ok, if I was originally cited and they took it out, then that's on them and not on you. As far as the context issue, I think that it was taken out of context because the introduction to the quote is the following: "As one anonymous writer states about her decision to stop blogging." The problem is, I didn't decide to stop blogging, and thus the context that this was from the middle of a meditation about identity in blogging that ultimately led me to say, at the end of the post, that I was moving to a new address and allowing my readers to follow me, was lost.

I apologize if I seemed to be insulting in my last comment. I didn't intend to be so. I was just trying to articulate why people became upset, and to address what I thought was a dismissiveness in your tone regarding those who did. I also never said that you were sexist. I brought up the thing about gender not to be accusatory but rather in a "I'd be interested in hearing you respond to this because you really haven't addressed gender in this post or in the IHE one" tone, which i fear did not come across in my comment. At any rate, I apologize for my lack of clarity regarding that, and I apologize if I caused you some offense. If I did so I'm sure that happened because I was snippy at feeling that my thoughts about the issue of having a blog with a pseudonym were misrepresented and not attributed.

Posted by Dr. Crazy @ 02/23/2006 04:02 PM EST

Dr. Crazy wasn't saying that you're biased against women, Jeff. She's suggesting that there might be reasons why women write under pseudonyms, whether as bloggers or as novelists. (It appears that more women write blogs under pseudonyms than men do.) There might be more to the story, in other words, than assumptions about professional academic behavior or assumptions about blogging. I believe that part of her point is simply to suggest we look at the ways in which gender and writing affect one another.

Posted by gzombie @ 02/23/2006 03:55 PM EST

Dr Crazy
You were cited. IHE took it out.
There were a few other citations they took out as well. I don't think the quote was really out of context, but I also didn't insult you or call you names. I offered a critique of blogging being taking too seriously (and all the implications that come with that). You can (and you folks do) insult me and you know who I am. I don't know what else there is to that debate.
As for gender, where is there evidence that I have been biased against women? Nowhere. That is a false claim.

Posted by Jeff @ 02/23/2006 03:23 PM EST

I'm not going to say that I've read all of the responses to your piece around the internet, though I've seen some. My sense from those I have read is that people were irked by the piece because it appeared that you didn't take seriously what some are trying to do with their pseudonymous blogs (a), that you didn't seem to really read them before judging them (b), and that they basically didn't buy the argument that you make about "seriousness" vs. what you deem to be "play." (c)

For my part, I was ticked off that you quoted me without identifying me as the author of the quote, that you took the quote out of context for your own ends, and that you didn't seem to have read the post from which the quote was taken. In fact, the post that you quoted from was about how I wasn't quitting blogging, but I suppose had you identified the quotation that you would have had to deal with the pesky problem that I had not decided to quit blogging because the weight of my pseudonymity was too much to bear.

At the end of the day, I'm over it, but I'm not sure that your dismissive tone regarding some legitimate criticisms about what you wrote does much to make your case stronger. For example, if you wanted to know who I am, I'd tell you. But I'm doing something different with my blog than what I do as a "public intellectual," and so it doesn't make sense to collect it under that particular "name of the author." My blog is not a professional document, though it is a document that relates to my profession. This makes perfect sense to me.

Finally, I agree that this question of access to writing (scholarly, creative, whatever) is an interesting one. I'm just not sure exactly why it relates to all bloggers who choose to do so under a pseudonym. Also, related to the comment above about the way that the novel caused anxiety as a genre similarly: Lots of women writers wrote novels under pseudonyms in the 19th century - did you ever consider that many of those who choose to write blogs under pseudonyms are also women and that there may be some correspondence between these moves, although they are 200 years or so apart from one another? Should we dismiss George Eliot because she didn't write as Mary Ann Evans?

Posted by Dr. Crazy @ 02/23/2006 03:16 PM EST

That's a great point, Derek. And maybe that's what I meant when I said "ethos."

Posted by Jeff @ 02/23/2006 03:09 PM EST

Safety in the untraceable. Might be that it's access both to scholarly materials *and* people. For me it's as much access as findability (or hybrid findability). Anon/pseudo choices cover paths, and to be sure, those decisions are motived by a variety of factors. When those paths are discoverable and followable, there's a greater chance for tracking down someone's work because of what they write in the blog. It's the move that goes: you said something at YD that made me order _Writing About Cool_ or you wrote something that compelled me to order Corder's book or whatever. Those connections and influences aren't trivial, but they do seem less available when I'm reading a pseudo/anon blog. When I can't follow a path from the blogger to their other work something is lacking (or differently constructed at the very least), leaving a tear in the network's yarn. Of course, there are a number of folks who, because their blogs tie into their work (even if semi-seriously from time to time), make paths available, whether I've met them or not, whether we share an 'a href' or not. Granted, I'm admitting to a particular notion of how the network functions best for me and how the pseudo/anon choice doesn't fit very well with that notion, at least as far as moving between blogs, professional appointments and peer-reviewed scholarship.

Posted by Derek @ 02/23/2006 03:06 PM EST

I think what I mean is:
The really intense (and angry) response is only to the mention of being anonymous - which is really just part of a larger context I wanted to create. But why such anger over this point? Because access to the blogs is easy. So people are afraid (I guess) to say stuff and they get pissed when you note that being anonymous is pretty silly overall. But writing professionally isn't so accessible (because of all kinds of barriers - one other I didn't note is just how difficult it is to write professionally as opposed to writing to a blog). But there - the stakes are bigger. If there is revenge (if!), it is more likely to be in a professional publication where the stakes are high.

Anyway - the irony has been noted before. I am known. Who are these people so pissed off? Who knows.

I'm glad you note the Cervantes point. I kind of like that part - the Cervantes/Rousseau isse. I wanted to imagine Rousseau afraid to use his real name because he was talking about self-pleasure. Nah. It wasn't that serious for him - serious subject matter; but not in the sense that he can't say it because he's afraid the medium doesn't allow that kind of work (that's how I imagine it anyway).

Posted by Jeff @ 02/23/2006 01:33 PM EST

I don't know. Is it really access? Or just access? We've got online journals, and while the profession hasn't always -- isn't always -- keen on them, I don't recall ever hearing anyone suggest avoiding online journals because just anyone can access them. Quite the opposite, actually: I've heard people use access as an argument for publishing in online journals.

I might be wrong, but I think you were much closer to the issue when talking about Cervantes and the novel. As I know you know, the novel, like so many other media technology-practices caused much anxiety. I might be wrong, but I'm wondering if its that we haven't interiorized, culturally and even often individually, the technological and practical aspects of blogging (by practical I mean all the ramifications emerging from the practices of blogging). Access, clearly, is a large issue, but it is, in turn, part of this larger issue.

Posted by John @ 02/23/2006 01:22 PM EST