Matters of identity

It occurs to me — well, it occurred to me when I initially posted the news about my postdoc — that my already lightweight veil of semi-anonymity has become a whole lot sheerer.* Of course, a determined and clever person could probably have already worked out my current location and my full name. But now it’s going to be a lot easier to figure out my true identity. I find, also, that now that I’ve been doing this blogging thing for a while, and now that I’m exiting my teaching job, I’m less inclined to maintain the semi-anonymity.

Initially, I was leery of people in my department finding out about my ambivalence about academia. I was also leery about students coming across my blog; I always preferred to maintain a distinction between my teaching and my personal life. But I’m not going back to teaching, and I stopped worrying about disclosing my career-change plans months ago.

I no longer feel like it’s a big risk for me to be critical of the current state of academia in my own name (I’m hardly the only one saying these things, after all). And I don’t think there’s anything in this blog that I’d be embarrassed to have associated with myself. I may display my amateurishness in fields I haven’t studied, or get cranky from time to time, or turn the occasional clunky sentence, or go on about things I haven’t meticulously researched, or yammer narcissistically about the future of this blog, but none of this strikes me as a big deal for people in my real life to know.

There’s still the “mom finds out about blog” factor (anyone else remember that Onion article? and when did the Onion go all “Premium,” anyway? Bastards!). I’m still not sure if I want this weblog to pop up when someone does a Google search for my full name. But I’m aware that I’m not really anonymous here, and I’m okay with that.

Somewhat related is the question of what I want this space to become now that I’m heading away from the academic track. I may well continue to post about life after academia, or my new library career path, or what I’m thinking about if I decide to keep up my scholarly pursuits in my spare time. Or I could just continue with the miscellany of topics I’ve already been posting about. I admire people with the energy and thoroughness to maintain specialized-topic blogs, but I’m not one of them. This blog will, I suspect, continue to be eclectic in the extreme — much like its author, who has always been fond of juggling too many interests to keep up with all at once.

* I’m thinking of Karita Mattila‘s Dance of the Seven Veils in the Met’s production of Salome this past season. Which I didn’t see, but I heard it was fabulous.

5 Responses to “Matters of identity”

  1. cindy says:

    I hope you will keep being you–as you say, eclectic. But also funny, unpredictable, warm, and well, amanda-ish 😉
    By the way, I’ve been thinking about the anonymity thing, too, and thinking about “coming out,” but it is also the googleability of it that bothers me.

  2. Mary says:

    The googlability thing is an interesting problem. I also don’t mind much if my full name is can be determined from my website, but I would like to avoid people who know my name being able to find the website easily. But search engines aren’t interested in that distinction. If the information is there, they will key your website on that information.
    It’s a lost battle for me anyway. That’s what comes of having an internet presence from age 17 onwards 🙁

  3. wolfangel says:

    I pretty much feel like you do, Cindy. It’s not that I mind that people could figure out who I am from my blog — marginally harder since I’ve never actually given my first name, but not difficult in any real way, and of course anyone who ran into it accidentally would know it’s me immediately — but I don’t want people to find it by googling me. I’m still not sure entirely why. Before I left it was because I was saying some things I wouldn’t want put to my name (in public) while I was a student in that department; now that issue is gone.
    In any case, I think this level of anonymity makes sense.
    I like the eclectic. It’s fun.

  4. Michelle says:

    Good luck on finding the right niche for your blog. For me, it was an incremental surrender based upon the practicality of being open on what is ultimately a personal blog, and a lazy nature that prohibited me from sticking to anonymity. However, I don’t have anything really at stake and I understand for many people, the image set forth is perhaps more serious than I see it.
    Re: the googleability, it’s a bit early to tell since I blasted my last blog and this one is still in its infancy, but so far, I’m pretty safe and I suspect it’s because my full name only appears on the “About me” page (which no one seems to ever read).

  5. Rana says:

    Familiar ground!
    Add me to the crowd of people who (now) don’t mind if regular readers can figure out who I am (though I want it to require some effort on their part), but don’t want to be Google-able. I guess I don’t want my blog to be the first thing people who don’t know me see when they Google me. Nor do I want family or co-workers to discover the blog on a whim. (Of course, if someone doesn’t know me well, they are not likely to Google my name properly, and there’s a lot of false positives out there.)
    I’ve long given up believing that my blog will ever have a coherent theme beyond “my blog” — I’m too flittery a person (the classic “grasshopper mind”) so how could my blog be anything but? I say, embrace the eclecticism!