Anonymity

An issue I lightly touched upon in my previous (only) post was that of internet/blog anonymity. For my own situation, I used the expression “semi-anonymous”, which I believe sums it up quite well. Unlike Belle, I don’t plan on posting information about myself that could potentially damage me or my family. Beyond your usual, bog-standard youthful indulgences and bouts of immaturity, I don’t think I have anything too severe to hide anyway. Nothing that comes to mind at the moment, at least.

While there is nothing which can damage my family per se, there certainly is enough that could upset them. Who wants to know that their little blue-eyed boy has taken quite a few drugs, smokes, drinks too much, has slept around, almost got thrown out of university three seperate times, looks at internet porn and experimented with bisexuality? Twice. I’d like to think that if such escapades came to light my parents, who seem a pretty liberal bunch on most issues, would not react with too much disdain. I have certainly heard enough stories about them from their youth. Stuff you don’t particularly want to hear about your own parents, but at least it means that if my naughty deeds were discovered they wouldn’t be able to take any sort of moral high ground without being complete hypocrites. Although I imagine they would try their best.

No, it’s my grandmother I’m worried about. Since her husband died last year, she’s the only grandparent I have left and she’s in a precarious state, both physically and mentally. She has an unnaturally high opinion of me and it makes me feel very guilty that I can’t or don’t live up to it. So when I see or speak to her, I keep up the pretense, for both our sakes. She’s very old-fashioned and a Catholic, and still believes I’m a virgin. I can’t even begin to imagine what she’d do if she found out what an irresponsible and nasty little shit I can be. And I do have a few rather malicious family members that I’m not on particularly good terms with who’d absolutely relish the opportunity to fuck me over. But that little part of my life’s for another time. Anyway I’m assuming most of you have a very similar relationship with your own grandparents, so I needn’t bother spelling it out any further.

Of course it’s not only family I have to worry about. We’re in an age where companies will check potential employees’ facebook accounts for lewd photos or comments. Hell they’ll even check current employees and if they don’t like what they see, they’re ahhht. There was “an incident” at my hall of residence last year that I was somewhat involved in, nothing too serious, but enough to really piss off the warden. Said warden then went through everyone’s (non-private) facebook page until he stumbled across an innocuous comment left by someone on a friend’s page mentioning my name. Cut to a week later and I’m saved at the last second from getting thrown out of uni by someone else’s impromptu confession. It was a VERY close call, let me tell thee.

Part of me understands fully well that the warden was only doing his job, and that trawling through residents’ facebooks was actually a very good idea that came to fruition with finding (most of) the culprits. Quite the detective. In his place, I dare say I would have done the same. But a bigger part of me just felt completely violated. I’m aware that this is quite irrational and self-pitying, since I was at the scene of the “crime” (although if guilt is quantifiable, then I was among the least guilty there). Something about our warden, in a position of “authority”, knowing the ins and outs of our lives just fucking angered me. It struck me as a flagrant abuse of power. It also scared me how easy it is to get people’s information off a site like facebook (and any of these “social networking” places) if they don’t configure their privacy settings properly. It wasn’t even my mistake that landed me in hot water, just two sentences on someone else’s wall talking about how “funny last night was” and mentioning a couple of names. My honeymoon period with Facebook ended a looong time ago.

Anyway, must dash in a minute. I do have more to say about the subject but for the moment this’ll do for now I suppose. To sum up what I’m getting at, semi-anonymity works for me. I say semi because, if by chance a friend, relative or someone who knows me well enough stumbles upon this blog, it wouldn’t take a genius to determine the identity of your humble author. In these first two posts alone and elsewhere on the site I have already given up some substantial facts about myself. Let’s not even mention the big fucking photo of me, which, delicious as it is, I shall probably deleting sooner rather than later. Please don’t cry.

If such an eventuality as my identification should occur (by myself or otherwise; deliberately or otherwise), I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. The gap between public and anonymous is a mine-strewn one I have yet to negotiate fully. I’m still making up my mind about what to do with this blog, and how to do it. Since I’ve already been burned once by the interweb, what’s to stop it happening again? Admittedly that first time was relatively minor, and no permanent damage was caused, but would I have been found out if facebook didn’t exist? I think not. Either way I certainly don’t want to lose any jobs, friends or opportunities over this, so I must tread carefully. Or perhaps no one will give a shit and I’m just being paranoid.

But as the old adage on my friend Sean’s t-shirt says:

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you

Wiser words by an item of clothing have seldom been uttered.

Ciao x