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I do have a pseudonym I use to post on a few more sensitive/private topics in a variety of forums…

As the last half-decade of academic blogging has made clear, valuable scholarly exchange online does not require the use of real names.

And as ought to be made clear by the comment threads of such venues as Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education–not to mention countless scholarly listservs–the use of real names does not ensure valuable scholarly exchange.

There are good reasons, as Brian explains above, to “be yourself online.” As Rana explains, however, there are also good reasons not to. Each writer needs to make her or his own decision, given their particular circumstances.

I’m not launching accusations at your name.

I am challenging the points you have written HERE, in this thread.

I have not bothered to Google you. I don’t know who you are or what you teach, or where you teach. For that matter, I haven’t even bothered to figure out whether “Jason Mittell” is your real name, or even if there IS a “Jason Mittell.”

What would “owning up to those claims” entail, honestly?

Would my words be any more or less true if I told you that I am Janice Franklin, Professor of Communications, at Little Rock College? Would my points be more valid and make more sense if I told you that I have a PhD in Mathematics from NYU and graduated in 1984? Would your arguments be strengthened if you knew that I had written a paper on the nine-lined ground squirrel and the effects of pesticide drift on its populations?

I find it interesting that you feel we are unequal ground here because of how we choose to represent ourselves – and you know what?

That proves my point.

You seem to feel attacked and vulnerable because you are letting it all hang out in an open forum – and, hello! That’s exactly why having the option of using a pseudonym is important!

I am completely owning up to my claims. They are mine, and I will continue to defend them to the best of my ability. Perhaps, you feel, I am not really doing this, in that I’m unwilling to put my personal and professional life at risk in order to please your sense of ownership, but, note this:

You’re not owning up to your claims either. You are fleeing the conversation, and refusing to defend what you have said.

So much for ownership and intellectual honesty.

(btw – ProfHacker folks – if this is becoming annoying to you, please let me know. I think I’ve made my point, even if Jason refuses to accept me as a valid debating partner.)

I do think there’s a difference in commenting or posting to a site about a personal experience, or exploring a taboo research area, or writing fan fiction, versus commenting on an academic blog or online publication.

• is yet another indication of your privilege and lack of awareness about it. You assume that all academic conversation is inherently abstract and not personal, and you would be wrong. Gender theory, for example, may be an exercise in objective intellectualism for someone cis-gendered, but it would carry personal overtones for someone who was trans or queer, whether or not that person desires it. All too often, if an academic engaging in such a conversation is known to be trans or queer, their ideas are taken less seriously than those of more “objective” scholars – ditto with race, ditto with feminist studies, and so on.

Moreover, as I said, your distinction is a distinction without a functional reality, as “through the magic of Google” it is easy for information to bleed outside the tidy boundaries you seem to envision enclosing “commenting on an academic blog” away from those who might be searching for other things. I mean, hell, man, haven’t you ever run into a student in a supermarket? If you can’t maintain the boundaries between personal and professional life offline, what on earth makes you think that they operate more rigorously online?

You’re trying to argue that your desire to create a safe little space for you and your colleagues on the internet justifies prejudice. That’s the logic of the gated community, and it works about as well online as it does off.

As someone who clearly falls in the category of undesirables beyond the gates, you’re going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that there’s more at work here than simple prejudice against people who you believe are not your intellectual equals.

…

And now, at this point, you’re probably angry at me for assuming things about you that aren’t true, and I can sense you working up a rebuttal along the lines that I’m just some random person who doesn’t know the least thing about you, and that it’s only because I’m “hiding” behind this pseudonym that I’m able to say such things to you.

And you know what? That’s the POINT. My sense of you, and your ideas, is based on what you have written here, not on whether or not I was able to Google your name and see that you teach Blah Blah at Whatever U. I’ve been writing under a pseudonym for nearly a decade now, and blogging for nearly three-quarters of that time, and I can safely say that my expertise in this area is both solid and respected, and probably outweighs yours. If that reputation, and that body of work – spread throughout a hundred blogs and comments threads – means nothing to you without there being a “real” name attached to it, that’s your problem, not mine.

I do feel somewhat perturbed myself by your assumption that knowing my professional affiliation would make a difference in how you assess what I have to say about a particular topic. It seems to me that that is a good way to reinforce existing hierarchies – Professor Big Name at Top Five University gets more respect than Adjunct Who at Small Community College – and works counter to the notion that it is the argument and the evidence that counts, not the status of the person expressing it.

Your method of checking identities would also fail in my own case, as I lack that kind of institutional support or permanence. Indeed, most of my colleagues at my particular institution are, like me, part-timers with no official presence anywhere on our institution’s website. So what would I have to do, then, fax you a copy of my degree? And how would you know that it was me, and not one of the other folks who share my name?

It seems like a lot of work just to have a conversation with you, honestly.

Which means, then, that you are choosing to limit your exposure to those who might have perspectives from outside the institution, perspectives that may well be valuable to you. It’s not unlike how many established people, comfortably ensconced in their various institutions, fail to realize just how expensive and difficult it is to attend conferences if you don’t have institutional backing. A couple of my friends, who are thoughtful people with rather impressive reputations both on and offline, were unable to attend a conference on which they’d been invited – invited! – to be panelists because they are both independent scholars and don’t have the kind of travel grants and such that most of y’all seem to take for granted.

So while I can see that the sort of ID-checking you’re describing might work for a small, limited sort of interaction between reviewers and reviewees, it – to be crass – sucks when you are talking about the exchange of scholarly ideas.

You’ve basically admitted that personal status is more important to you than the content of a person’s ideas – and I continue to find that more than a little appalling.

You also continue to be blind to the ways that privilege operates within and without the institution; you naively argue that everyone should be able to “connect what people say to what people are” as if there are no penalties for allowing people to do that. Not everyone is going to use that information to merely confirm identity; there are plenty of nasty petty people in academia – just like anywhere – and sometimes it is not safe to be “out” in public – not safe as in vulnerable to physical or professional attack – however much it might make you “perturbed” to not be able to identify someone to your personal satisfaction.

It is also worth noting that it’s not just one’s colleagues who might see this information – once such information is loose on the internet, it is fair game for anyone with a computer and an internet connection. There is no ivory tower on the internet, any more than there is in actual life.