I recently caught a glimpse of a topic on a blogging forum about whether people “are themselves” when they blog. It’s an interesting topic to think about - even those of us who blog under our own name don’t necessarily blog “as ourselves.” For example, I consider a post like this to be the real me: I talk this way in person, I talk about this type of topic… I try to blog as though I’m having a regular conversation with the reader. But at the same time, this isn’t a soapbox from which I can be completely, utterly honest. There are a lot of topics I’d like to blog about, but can’t for the simple reason that I don’t want everyone to know every detail of my life (especially considering that half of my family reads this thing…). Honestly, I find this a rather disturbing form of self-censorship.

Other bloggers don’t even write under their own names - they create an alias under which they can talk about whatever they want. Some do this to avoid the repercussions of someone they know finding their blog, others do so to avoid the sheer embarrassment they’d encounter writing about certain things. But whenever a bloggers goes anonymous, they’re suddenly able to blog about anything they wish, and thereby writing some of the most interesting posts.

So here’s my question to you about anonymous vs. signatured bloggers: which group is more honest?

I maintain that nobody is more revealing about who they really are than people who think that they’re anonymous.

Precisely the reason I often regret the egocentric pleasure I get out of seeing my name at the top of webpages…

I’m not sure. You can be honest without giving TMI. You can seem to tell all when anonymous and actually make it all up. I remember a few years ago a friend who was very upset to find out that a blogger she felt close to had been posing as male for a few years although actually female and not transitioning or anything like that. No way I could be anonymous, it would take exactly 2 seconds for some people to figure out who I was with some of the topics I want to write about.

Waldo has a good point. Blogging under your own name does create self-censorship. However, isn’t this something we do with all our friends and family? I might gripe to my sister about my mother, but I’m not going to air out that particular laundry on my blog. In many instances, this isn’t a case of censorship as respect for the other person.

Hmmm… I’ll many times re-read an entry I’m working on, realize that it’s a little too vitriolic or idiotic, and go back and “self-censor” it, but I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with that. As Sarabeth mentions above, we typically self-censor comments/emails/discussions in our daily lives anyway, so if anything, I find my blog to be a reasonable mirror of the opinions/thoughts I maintain in real-life.

That said, anonymous bloggers certainly have more freedom to expand beyond the boundaries they’re beholden to outside the Internet, but personally, I tend to avoid blogs that are completely anonymous, for the simple fact that anonymous bloggers also aren’t usually behold to the same standards as public bloggers are (of course, there are exceptions, and there are some excellent anonymous blogs).

When setting up my website years ago, I went back and forth on whether to be anonymous or not — I ultimately went ahead with using my own name because anyone and everyone in my industry has a website and blog. But to the point of having more freedoms, I also have a second blog I maintain. I wouldn’t necessarily call it anonymous, as I link to it from my website, but it’s a place where I put entries I wouldn’t necessarily want to put on my own site (for whatever reason).

So in short: when discussing honesty in blogs, it really depends on what you’re looking for. There are plenty of blogs out there, for example, dedicated to programming techniques that obviously have no benefit in being anonymous. But if you’re looking for the answer of who shot JFK, you’ll probably find that more readily from an anonymous source.

Anonymous bloggers lose me pretty quickly. I like to believe there’s a real person behind the content. Blogging relationships are all about transparency. There’s no room for blogging as anybody but you.

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