Authenticity and Identity

AKMA has been raising once again issues of authenticity, identity, and now confidentiality. I wasn't here for the discussion of these matters that happened earlier on, so I'm looking forward to whatever comes of this. That and I've got some archive reading to do.

Several things came to my mind when I read AKMA's post. First, I wondered about the psychological or moral* impact that the need for confidentiality in certain professional relationships has on both the secret-giver and the secret-hearer. AKMA refers to his own obligations of confidentiality that arise from his clerical role. Mine arise from my role as a legal counselor. (Though I'm not a licensed attorney until the end of the month, I've practiced under state student practice rules, so I've felt some of the demands of client confidence.) Second, I thought about pseudonymity, speech, and the sorts of social pressures that bear upon a speaker. The first of these will wait for another time, but I'll discuss the latter briefly in the context of weblogs.

Several bloggers in the legal field have chosen to blog anonymously or semi-anonymously. I am not truly anonymous -- if you go to tph-lex.com, the parent domain of this one, my name's splattered across the top. I thought very carefully about whether I would try to blog anonymously, and decided not to. However, having made that decision, I have subsequently found myself being extremely cautious about my posts, even though I do not have anything to say that I think is especially volatile.

My caution now probably arises from my present state of employment: un-. The general impression that one gets from talking to law school career services people is that one must work hard to appear perfect in the eyes of potential employers. That makes me a little anxious about what I say publicly. If I appear too curious or skeptical about, say, aspects of employment economics in the legal field or other matters that cross my mind during my job hunt, I may give some potential employers a negative impression in the unlikely event that they cross this page. I don't want to take many chances about that. My lack of anonymity, combined with my lack of knowledge about what a potential employer may dislike, makes me cautious.

Legal bloggers, also known as "blawgers," who are securely employed tend to write without any sort of anonymity or pseudonymity. A glance around the blawgosphere discloses that academics tend to write publicly. This makes a lot of sense -- academia rewards thoughtful writing, and tenure provides even greater job security for those who have it. Among law students, one finds a lot more anonymity and pseudonymity. Some of it is complete anonymity, and some of it is partial anonymity that leaves enough undisclosed that finding an author's name would be challenging except for a few. Alice's true identity remains indiscernable, as Garrett Moritz remarked in a recent review of law school blogs. So is the author of Waddling Thunder. JCA of Sua Sponte signs with what one takes to be her initials, and writes enough about her daily life that if I were in her law school class I'd probably know who she is by the end of the year, but most of us will not. Garrett Moritz himself is one of the few who posts openly using his full name. Paul Gutman does the same. Does their status as students at law schools that rank at the very top among U.S. law schools give them less cause for concern? Perhaps it's simply an unrelated character trait, but I find it tempting to speculate. In practice, established attorneys like Ernie and Denise blog using their full names. A newer attorney, TPB, blogs using initials that would require a lot of digging to connect with a name, provided that the initials he has chosen in fact go with his name. Pseudonymous, he feels free to blog more openly than I.

In the end, of course, this is all speculation. I haven't a large enough sample to find any sort of reliable correlation. Only those who write know why they choose anonymity for a particular piece of writing.

What especially interests me is AKMA's description of the tradeoff in anonymity and pseudonymity choices. "[T]he practice of pseudonymity buys the prerogative to say whatever one wants at the cost of acceding to one's unfreedom to speak in one's own name." [here] When one chooses to speak anonymously, one loses the psychological benefit of identifying with the public expression of one's thoughts. Presumably the anonymous speaker trades off that benefit against some kind of social rejection that the speaker suspects she or he will suffer if the general public knows that she or he is the speaker. Pseudonymity is even more complex, because one goes so far as to put a different name on one's speech. AKMA asks what effect the act of using different names for different speech has upon the speaker in terms of the speaker's identity.

I want the psychological benefit that comes from identifying myself with the things that I say (even though this means that on occasion I will kick myself for appearing less intelligent when I say something without thinking carefully enough about it). Yet still, having chosen not to hide my name, I choose my topics very carefully. Perhaps I'm simply trying to please too many people. What do others think about this, especially those of you who have chosen to blog in partial or complete anonymity?

* A note: When I use the word "moral," I use it in a broad sense. At the risk of oversimplifying, I'll say for now that I use the word "moral" to refer to the impact of individuals' decisions and behavior on their own quality of life as well as to the impact of their decisions and behavior on the quality of life of others. I am not limiting my use of the word "moral" to a single ethical construct (e.g. rights and duties, the conforming of thought or behavior to a transcendental ideal, action in conformity with a logical categorical imperative, or other conceptual frameworks that are out there). It might help, though, if I say that in the context of this post, I'm using the word in the sense in which Aristotle might have used it. He wrote of "virtues" as those qualities that develop a good (that is, flourishing human) life for the virtuous individual as well as beneficial social interactions in the community.