There's been a lot of discussion about anonymous blogging lately - The Invisible Adjunct and Amitai Etzioni's posts come to mind - and I've been doing some thinking about it as a result.
When I started this blog (almost 3 months ago!), I knew I didn't want it to be anonymous. It didn't have anything to do with the communiatrian concerns voiced by Amitai Etizoni, or with any other strongly held beliefs about how one should blog. For some reason, committing intellectually to the words and ideas I write is tremendously difficult for me, and I knew that for this to be a valuable experience, I'd have to focre myself to do that. (By the way, the problem is even more pronounced when it's about artistic responsibility - as the premiere of this opera nears, I'm having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I won't be able to change things anymore.)
In the case of this blog, there's definitely been some hedging. I didn't tell (and in some cases, still haven't told) many of my friends and acquaintances, because I didn't want to have to deal with being able to imagine particular readers and wondering how my posts would play with them. Also, the name change was kind of a fiasco (just how did I end up with a name I hate?), and I seem to have made it worse by adding the subtitle at the top. But after only three months my comfort level has increased by a couple orders of magnitude.
Of course, I sympathize with others' reasons for writing anonymously. Just this weekend I had a sort of big brawl with my dad over race issues, and the topic has completely dominated my thoughts since then. But I feel uncomfortable writing about it here because people we both know will be reading, and some of the implications are pretty personal and specific. I may end up writing about it later, but if I do, it will be in a crystallized form, without the richness and warmth that the details would bring with them...
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