Anonymous?

I have a friend who says that people who use pseudonyms to post on the internet are cowards, since they are too afraid to use their real names when expressing their thoughts. It can be deduced even by a 5 year old that I am therefore a coward myself. Would you agree?

Around the internet I see so many online avatars with names that aren’t real. (On the other hand I also hear names of real people which would be much more suitable for an online avatar.) I never thought twice about the fact that I wanted to follow this trend. There are a million plausible risks of revealing who I am to the billions of people on the internet, the most scary probably being that my parents realise that I am on publishing the internet (they will be informed soon though). You see, they are old fashioned. Concepts such as Facebook and blogging are new to them, and quite predictably they would rather not dip their toes into such foreign territory. They also don’t want me to do so.

My Facebook problem was solved about two years ago due to the fact that I changed schools, which gave me a good excuse to stay on Facebook to keep in touch. After all, many of my school activities are organized online, and the best and most hassle-free way of keeping in touch with my old friends is to chat on Facebook. It’s fun and it is safe, as long as you are careful and you know what you are doing. It took a lot of convincing to get my parents to realise this.

Blogging was something I didn’t bother trying to get past my parents. I have an urge to write stuff and share with the world, something which I could not explain to my parents. But I took the middle path and made a blog under a false name, back in 2007. As I have probably mentioned before, this died out after a year. I felt the urge again soon, but I held back until last year when I made this blog. Just 20-something posts later I got bored again. But this time round I have decided to be back for good.

I don’t really feel like revealing my real self right now. I don’t feel a need to do so. My friend does though. And this has got me wondering about how people view aliases. Do a lot of blog readers have a preference for bloggers who are honest about themselves? Does it feel more personal or trustable to read a blog post when you know that you can get in contact with its author after a simple directory search? Usually when I read a blog I don’t mind whether its author uses a real name or not. Most blog posts are about personal views, so if I don’t like it I can put in a comment giving my view, or else I can just ignore it. I have no intention of having a personal chat with the author, either for good or bad reasons. So I don’t really care about it. But do other people care if I am just a “Young Lankan Blogger” and not “_____ _______”?