Few years back we had trouble on this blog because of anonymous posts attacking the late Professor V.K Samaranayaka. He complained to our funders and partners. But we held to the principles of allowing anonymous posts and non-moderation. Here is a another discussion about anonymity:
Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.
As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”
But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.
2 Comments
Sanjana Hattotuwa
Rohan, thanks for the heads up. You forgot to link the excerpt to the original in the NYT – http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/opinion/26dowd.html. Pointing to a complementary article in The Economist recently, my last post on this issue is here – http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/online-identity-real-or-fake-for-a-reason/.