Tedra Osell, "Where Are the Women?: Pseudonymity and the Public Sphere, Then and Now<" (Page 4 of 4)
There were a number of similarities and a few potentially significant
differences between men's and women's explanations of their choices to
blog pseudonymously. Both men and women used pseudonyms to protect their
jobs from possible employer disapproval of their blogging. However,
both men and women also explicitly reported using their real names
because they wanted their blogging to be professionally advantageous.
Men were far more likely than women to report that they viewed blogging
as a form of professional advertising, though these men also said that
they guarded their family's privacy by minimizing personal content. A
number of women reported the opposite decision: they blogged
pseudonymously so that they could talk about personal experiences of
work or domestic life while maintaining their privacy. This survey,
then, suggests that the association of men with the public world and
women with the private world is reflected, to some extent, in bloggers'
choice of topics, and that the latter—rather than diffidence about the
public nature of blogging—drives some women's choices to use
aliases.
This choice, however, is mutable. Two of the women who blogged
pseudonymously said that they had deliberately chosen to break their
pseudonymity in order to claim the blog as a professional asset; in
other words, they did not initially plan to use blogging as a career
benefit. No men indicated that their awareness of blogging as a
potential career benefit had developed over time.
It seems important to
call attention to the specific advantage of periodicity in this regard:
because blogs are published at intervals over time, bloggers'
conceptions of the purpose and audience of their blogs is subject to
change, and this change in turn may affect their self-presentation and
content. The mechanisms of these changes are beyond the scope of this
study, but the effect of blogs' temporal nature on readers, authors, and
content surely bears further examination.
The most striking distinctions between men and women bloggers were in
their reported awareness of gender as it affected content and in their
reasons for using pseudonyms. A much larger percentage of women than of
men explicitly recognize the ways that their content was gendered; even
women who saw their blogs primarily as professional, rather than
personal, reported that they occasionally addressed specific gender
issues on their blogs. Most interesting to me, two men who used
pseudonyms reported doing so as a kind of game, because they found it
amusing to experiment with a persona. In contrast, most women who said
that they enjoyed creating their pseudonymous characters explicitly
said that this enjoyment was a post facto realization. Although both
men and women said they used pseudonyms to avoid being identified by
their employers, many women simply explained pseudonymity as the result
of fear, not of professional repercussions, but for their or their
children's physical safety. Five women reported having been "threatened"
online before taking up blogging.[24]
One man who did express
anxiety about putting his or his family's real names on the Internet
explicitly noted that his wife was more afraid of it than he was.
Perhaps as a corollary to their fear of being personally harassed, a
number of women reported that being pseudonymous allowed them to be
more honest, more confident, and more assertive writers. Women were
particularly likely to articulate the ways that blogging functioned as a
process of discovery (including, as mentioned above, the discovery of
the advantages of using their real names). My sense of survey
respondents' comments is that bloggers, like eighteenth-century
periodical essayists, begin with pseudonyms because of perceived
material dangers to their livelihoods or, particularly for women, their
persons. Unlike periodical essayists, however, modern women bloggers
report no concern about the personal effects of publishing in and of
itself. In fact, several pseudonymous bloggers said that they wished
they could "claim" their writing, and that this desire made them feel
ambivalent about their anonymity.
Despite surface similarities, then, the experiences and intentions
of anonymous women bloggers do not seem to be the same as those
attributed to anonymous women writers from previous eras. This
distinction may indicate a revision of our understanding of previous
generations of women who, being no longer available to report their
intentions and self-perceptions as writers, have to rely on scholars'
interpretations of circum-stantial evidence for our understanding of
their experiences. For contemporary scholars of blogging, it suggests
that the "where-are-the-women" question must be understood in a
historically specific light. While the very thing that allows some
women to be more confident writers—pseudonymity—also makes it easier for
careless or casual readers to overlook their presence as women, we also
have a unique opportunity to study how that seeming disadvantage may
actually contribute to women's decisions to write and to their
development as writers. Historically, pseudonymity rendered
eighteenth-century women essayists invisible, but while it may seem to
do the same for women bloggers, their own words intimate a new
appreciation of the ways that in fact it brings them into the open.
Endnotes
1. Kevin Drum, "Women's Opinions," posted to
Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, February 20, 2005,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ archives/individual/2005_02/005691.php.
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2. Steven Levy, "Blogging Beyond the Men's Club,"
Newsweek, March 21, 2006,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ id/7160264/site/newsweek/.
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3. Maureen Dowd, "Dish It Out, Ladies," The New
York Times, March 13, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/ 2005/03/13/opinion/ 13dowd.html?ex=1268456400&en=
f2460981091aa10e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland. [Return to text]
4. David Hochman, "Mommy (and Me)," The New
York Times, January 30, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/ fashion/30moms.html?ex= 1264741200&en=635d616a9c739515&ei= 5090&partner=rssuserland.
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5. CNN.com, "Pundits and Knitters Find Common Ground
in Weblogs," November 3, 2005,
http://edition.cnn.com/ 2005/TECH/internet/08/10/mena.trott/.
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6. Deborah Fallows, "How Women and Men Use the
Internet," Pew Internet and American Life Project, December 28, 2005,
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Women_and_Men_online.pdf; Susan C.
Herring et al., "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of
Weblogs," in Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of
Weblogs, ed. L. Gurak et al. (University of Minnesota: 2004),
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html.
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7. Scott Eric Kaufman, "A Post in Two Parts," posted
to Acephalous, February 12, 2006,
http://acephalous.typepad.com/ acephalous/2006/02/a_post_in_two_p.html.
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8. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The
Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 23. [Return to text]
9. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
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10. Asa Briggs, A Social History of England,
3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1999), 146.
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11. Richmond P. Bond, Studies in the Early English
Periodical (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1957),
9. [Return to text]
12. John Gay, "The Present State of Wit (1711)," in
Essays on Wit, facsimile of the original edition with an introduction by
Donald F. Bond (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society).
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13. David Brooks, "Respect Must Be Paid," The New
York Times, June 25, 2006,
http://select.nytimes.com/ 2006/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html.
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14. Richard Steele, The Tatler, 1709-1711, 3
vols., ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
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15. Habermas, 93. [Return to text]
16. Peter Steiner, cartoon in The New Yorker, July 5, 1993, 61.
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17. The following list of posts is just a sample:
Academics Anonymous,
Against My Better Judgment,
Anonymous Female Academic Blogging: A Parallel Blogosphere?,
On the Internet, No One Knows You're a Dog,
Women Bloggers (And Other Quiet People) [available by password only]. There's
even a blog with the title Anonymous is a Woman.
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18. Shaun Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics
of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
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19. Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public
Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
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20. Steele, 17.
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21. Gay, "The Present State of Wit."
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22. Declan McCullagh, "Create an E-Annoyance, Go
to Jail," CNet News, January 11, 2006,
http://news.com.com/ 2102-1028_3-6022491.html?tag=st.util.print.
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23. John Holbo, "Blogging and the Law," posted to
Crooked Timber, January 10, 2006,
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/10/blogging-and-the-law/.
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24. There have been a number of studies showing
that women are very likely to be harassed or threatened online. Robert
Meyer and Michel Cukier report that women are 25 percent more likely to
be harassed online than men ("Assessing the Attack Threat Due to IRC
Channels" [University of Maryland: 2006],
http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf).
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