Does this impact your thinking about this person from the point of reading?
You’ve figured the answers already, so let me get down to where I stand on each of these questions, and why. And let me preface this by saying that this is an issue that affects anybody who uses the internet — the readers of this publication are only a small subset.
I do not agree with the anonymity in material put out in the public domain. Or any other domain for that matter. Any rational analysis will arrive at the same conclusion.
In the old days, ‘anon’ was the self-effacing fellow who wrote sentimental poetry and didn’t (often with good reason) want to take the credit for it. ‘Anon’ graduated to a purveyor of taboo subjects once printing became cheap, and wrote leaflets. Once ‘God’ and ‘good’ began being questioned, he graduated to pornography.
But even this ‘anon’ had a mooring: a printline with an address that was usually traceable. Perhaps to some damp basement in Camden or a dreary offset press near Janata cinema in North Calcutta. Those were the days when ‘anon’ took responsibility.
I still remember the time when the staffers of a small and stupid newspaper were arrested after the assasination of Rajiv Gandhi. The paper had alleged that multiple former prime ministers had been part of a conspiracy to bump off a resurgent Rajiv. Copies of the paper flew off the stands on May 22, 1991 and hapless sub-editors were driven to the cooler soon after. Still, there was some honour in this: an address the cops could go to.
Nowadays, this is a number. Often, not even unique: a shifting, dynamic cloud in a sky of murky ether (a laptop somewhere, a cybercafe elsewhere, a stolen wi-fi connection, you get the drift). Plus, there is the tyrannical secrecy of the hosts of these parasites. Try and get an answer about who a blogger is from, say, Google. I can gurantee you that they will end up knowing much more about you than you about the question you asked. Then they will spam you for the rest of your cyberlife.
This is all a bit too much for Sub-Inspector Pandey (or Gul or Khan) at the cybercrimes division of the average police force. He will lose the plot. And simply write ‘NA’ under address. Don’t complain to him.
The short answers to the next two questions I asked are: Yes, I do file away what I read, no matter where I read it, even if it is under ‘bullshit, most likely’; and yes, it does impact how I view this person, say at a job interview. I might reject the bullshit, but I have to consider it. That, is its impact.
But it isn’t as black and white as I have wanted it to sound. There are situations where there is no recourse but anonymity. In China or Iran, say, while criticising the establishment. In these cases, you have to measure the value of anonymity on the scale of public interest. As for the frequent case of anonymous sources in pieces without bylines, well, that is resolved easily: the masthead takes responsibility. One of the finest publications in the world, The Economist, doesn’t carry the names of writers. This is what is called ‘decent anonymity’. The best restaurant reviewers do the same. But there is seldom anything decent about the scurrillous anonymous blogger.
I bring all of this up because I’ve just outed one of these chaps in India. If you know of one, then I strongly advise you to out him too — do weigh him on the public interest scale before doing this.
My advise to Google would be to first, provide information when it is sought and second, default set the phrase ‘anonymous said’ to read ‘coward said’. That should be a reasonable disincentive.
For those who want to read the whole sordid story, here’s a link: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/my-settlement-with-newsx
Published in The Express Tribune, October 21st, 2010.
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