Anti-pseudonym Bingo, NSTIC NOI Appendix 9

This post is Appendices 8 and 9 of Kaliya’s NSTIC Governance NOI Response – please see this page for the overview and links to the rest of the posts. Here is a link to the PDF.
Anti-pseudonym Bingo
Wanting to and being able to use your legal name everywhere is associated with privilege.
The geek feminism blog published Anti-pseudonym bingo where the the idea is to play it against a commenter or a comment thread who is against pseudonymity.     A full row or column wins! (The free square is a giveaway.) 

It is published under Creative Commons Public Domain Licence: creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

 
 
On Refusing to Tell You My Name
9: On Refusing to Tell You My Name
by Anna
http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/04/14/on-refusing-to-tell-you-my-name/
I’ve tried to be really careful about separating work-online identities. “Anna” is not the name on my ID, and it is not what anyone I work with calls me. Googling my government-ID name and my work-related email address gets you either people who obviously aren’t me, or an unused account on one of the “sort your books” sites. But googling my email address, my private one, leads you here. Or to my now-locked journal. Or to my now-deleted tumblr account.
This is one of the reasons why I get angry when people talk dismissively of those who choose to use pseudonyms online. “Oh,” comes the dismissive sniff. “You’re not willing to stand up behind what you’ve said.” Or “If you really believed that, you’d say it behind your ‘real’ name.”
Women like me – and so many other women and men with “hidden” disabilities, women and men who are trans*, people who are non-gender binary, who are bi or lesbian or gay, people who write about their struggles with racism or sexism or homophobia or bullying at work, people who are otherwise marginalized – risk losing their jobs, having their children taken away from them, risk being attacked in their homes or at work, having their children threatened, just for writing about their lives online.
There are all sorts of reasons people are pseudonymous on the internet. This one was mine. It’s not hard to find people with different, but equally pressing – and even more pressing – reasons for being pseudonymous.
from: Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet:
page 35
On the Internet, Nobody Knows Your a Dog; it is possible to “computer cross-dress” and represent yourself as a different gender, age, or race. In millennium America, this supposedly radically democratic aspect of the Net is celebrated and frequently and unconditionally. The cartoon celebrates access to the Internet as a social leveler that permits even dogs to freely express themselves in discourse to their masters, who are deceived into thinking that dogs are their peers rather then their property. The element of difference, in this cartoon the difference between species, is comically subverted in this image; in the medium of cyberspace, distinctions and imbalances in power between beings who perform themselves solely through writing seem to have been deferred, if not effaced.
This utopian vision of cyberspace as a promoter of a radically democratic form of discourse should not be underestimated. Yet the image can be read on several levels. The freedom of which the doc chooses to avail itself is the freedom to “pass” as part of a privileged group – human computer users who can access the Internet. This is possible because of the discursive dynamic of the Internet, particularly in chat spaces like LamdabaMOO, where users are known to others by self-authored names they give their “characters” rather than more revealing e-mail addresses that include domain names.
 
This post is Appendices 8 and 9 of Kaliya’s NSTIC Governance NOI Response – please see this page for the overview and links to the rest of the posts. Here is a link to the PDF.
This is the section before: Resource Guide on Public Engagement
This is the section after: Who is Harmed by a “Real Names” Policy?