Somebody recently asked me whether I had figured out who Female Science Professor is. I truthfully replied that I haven’t even tried.
That was the first thing that came to mind when some jerk from the National Review revealed the identity of “Publius”, kicking off another round of discussion about the etiquette of revealing identities that bloggers have chosen to conceal. This one probably won’t be any more revealing than the previous go-rounds.
It’s worth a tiny bit of effort, though, to fight for correct language in this case. Lots of people, most of them right-wingers, will be referring to “Publius” as “anonymous,” in an effort to tar him with the negative connotations of that word. “Publius” wasn’t anonymous, though, any more than “Female Science Professor” is, or “Mark Twain” was. Those people are pseudonymous, and that’s an important distinction.
An anonymous person is someone with no name and no identity. Anonymous people leave comments on blogs under different names, using different IP addresses. They send unsigned letters to newspapers and congressional representatives, and leave tips with the FBI.
Someone like Publius, or FSP, or Mark Twain writes under a different name than their given name. This does not mean that they are without identity, though– quite the contrary. They write consistently under a single name, and this body of work establishes an identity for them that is every bit as solid as the identity that “Chad Orzel” establishes for me.
I haven’t tried to figure out who FSP is, because it doesn’t matter. The alias is enough to establish an identity, as revealed through years worth of blog posts. And that’s really the thing that matters in blogdom, or even in literature.
Pseudonymity has a long and honorable tradition in literature, and Publius and Female Science Professor fit in that. Anonymity, not so much. It’s a distinction that matters.