I've thought about writing this reminder for a few months now, but I keep pushing the thought away. Surely it is unnecessary. Today's events have confirmed that it needs saying.
Occasionally, for shits and giggles, I click on the profile of various commenters. Many of you have developed fairly elaborate pseudonym files with interests and snarky quotes.
An alarming number of folks link directly to blogs for their classwork.
You may feel comfortable using your real identity or blogging from a master account. So be it. But if you haven't thought about this, you might open CM from another browser to see how much a stranger can see of your own profile.
For all our sakes: keep it private.
I think that's good advice. It never occurs to me to wonder about the posters here. They often drop hints about their jobs or cities, but I rarely put them together. And I know from the RYS days that many folks use alternate cities or states to identify their "miserable" personae.
ReplyDeleteRYS once placed me in a city in Texas...and I wrote them a nasty email...The Longhorns were my nemesis as an undergrad!!!
This is why I have no Facebook, no MySpace....you could find me but it woulden't matter for reasons that I won't discuss here.
ReplyDeleteGood points. I think the corollary (sort of along the lines of "trust but verify") is not to write anything that would be truly disastrous if, despite our best efforts at anonymity, we were outed. For those of us without tenure, that probably means avoiding criticism of colleagues, at least those with whom we have direct relationships (complaints about Deans and Provosts, especially if couched in terms of group tendencies, seem a bit safer; department chairs fall somewhere in between). Students are pretty safe, if only because the majority of them do seem to blend together after a while.
ReplyDeleteI live on the Eastwest coast of the Northerlysoutherly United States, right in the geographic center of the periphery. Good luck finding me!
ReplyDeleteBut as far as the topic is concerned, yes, be anonymous. Nobody really wants to know who we really are, but why take chances?
It would be easy enough to narrow me down to one of about 2 dozen - maybe 1.5 dozen - people in my field and my geographic location, both of which I have mentioned on here, and which can be found in my blog of the same name. Since my age, gender, rank and family status are roughly guessable too that probably narrows it down to one of maybe 6 people. But you'd have to know my field reasonably well.
ReplyDeleteAll of which means that if my chair is reading this blog, she certainly knows who I am. (Hi sweetie!) But then I never say anything bad about her. Best chair you could imagine. Honest. We all worship the ground she walks on. Really!
People who know me very well might be able to guess who I am based on things I've said about myself here. But anybody who knows me that well is not somebody I'd be worried about on that score.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I do try to throw a few red herrings in to make it hard for anyone to narrow it down to a number as small as Merely mentions above. Nothing I've written here or on RYS could get me in any real hot water, but I'd rather not subject myself to the judgment of my more sanctimonious colleagues who would surely think ill of me.
But if I ever decide to write a post in which I express my desire for carnal relations with my Dean (I'm shuddering at the thought) I'll be sure to do it under Strelnikov's name.
I know I've said the kind of college I teach in, my real city, and my discipline. My name is not Darla, but I'm Darla inside, I can tell you that.
ReplyDeleteOh, I also attribute all my more embarrassing anecdotes to Strelnikov. I figure we're all safe doing that - they'll never find him. I mean if we ever figured out who he was he'd have to kill us anyway, right?
ReplyDeleteI wonder how hard it would be to identify one of the more garrulous among us by writing style. I seem to recall that was the basis on which Ted Kaczynski was identified by his brother as the Unabomber after the New York Times published his "manifesto."
ReplyDeleteOh my. So many lessons for flakes *and* proffies in this episode.
ReplyDelete(1) Real anonymity online doesn't exist. Limited temporary obfuscation is the best you can expect. This is why I post nothing --in any forum-- that I wouldn't be comfortable with each of my wife, my daughter and my mother reading.
(2) Once you commit anything (whether it's sonorous or screed) to the tender mercies of the Interwebs: you've lost control of the content forever. Hence my simple test in (1) above...
(3) I keep a deliberately small online persona, beginning with no Facebook (for several personal and professional reasons, the least of which is FB's demonstrated variability of privacy settings).
This is one of a handful of online forums where I have a user name and do anything other than lurk. None of them share a user name, and only one is directly tied to my real name. The content is innocuous (related to the car I drive, some consumerism and whining here about my marginal role in academia), but none of those audiences need insight into my other avocations.
I've never regularly looked at student facebook or myspace (remember myspace?) pages, but...years ago, as an icebreaker assignment to online research, I would ask students to post links to sites they were interested in. Not surprisingly for then, one of them linked to his/her myspace profile. The picture there was said student with a hat made from a beer 12-pack back, and "asshole" written across it in big letters. Many HR departments do rudimentary searches of online personas as part of the hiring process. It's worth thinking about.
@CDP: I'm pretty sure that someone using FBI-level rhetorical-analysis tools and/or expertise could link up my posts here with one or two other, entirely separate, online identities under which I post. I'm also pretty sure, since I'm *not* threatening to blow anybody or anything up, they're highly unlikely to bother. I do think the precautions I've taken would protect me from the sort of hiring-committee search Miserable mentions, and that strikes me as to the good (if there's a member of a hiring committee desperately using sophisticated means to dig up hard-to-find not-quite-dirt on candidates, I probably don't want to work for that department anyway).
ReplyDeleteI also suspect that, if any of my colleagues are reading here, familiarity with my writing style from email might increase their suspicions that they know who I am. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that any colleagues who do read here (which could possibly include my immediate supervisor and chair), are among the ones I trust and respect, even if I might disagree with them at times, here and/or in real life. And I'm quite certain that my Dean and Provost are not reading here, at least not with the intention of sniffing out rebellion among the ranks. While they may have their faults, they do have a better grasp on the big picture than that. I'm pretty sure that the only way I'd get flak at that level were if I made it easy to connect my university and my comments via google; they definitely care about reputation, online and otherwise. And besides, if they want to identify the "opposition," all they have to do is go address the Faculty Council and/or the local AAUP chapter. They've got their hands quite full enough dealing with the tenure-line faculty; unless we commit some sort of fairly spectacular crime that gets reported by the local media, contingent faculty aren't even a blip on their radar screens (which can be frustrating at times, but in this case is probably just as well).