I’m coming in to this a bit late, but since I really do care about the online science blogging community,I still have something that I want to say.<\/p>\n
For those who don’t know, there’s a complete horses ass named Henry Gee. Henry is an editor at the science journal Nature. Poor Henry got into some fights with DrIsis (a prominent science blogger), and DrIsis was mean to him. The poor little guy was so hurt that he decided that he needed to get back at her – and so, Henry went ahead and he outed her, announcing her real name to the world.<\/p>\n
This was a thoroughly shitty thing to do.<\/p>\n
It’s not that I think Isis didn’t do anything wrong. We’ve got history, she and I. My experience with her led me to conclude that she’s a petty, vicious bully that takes great pleasure in inflicting pain and anguish on other people. She’s also someone who’s done a lot of good things for her friends, and if you want to find out about any of it, go read another blog – plenty of people have written about her in the last couple of days.<\/p>\n
If she’s so awful, why do I care that someone outed her?<\/p>\n
Because it’s not just about her.<\/p>\n
The community that we’re a part of isn’t something which has been around for all that long. There’s still a lot of fudging around, figuring out the boundaries of our online interactions. When people play games like outing someone who’s using a pseudonym, they’re setting a precedent: they’re declaring to the community that “I know Xs real name, and here it is”. But beyond that, they’re also<\/em> declaring to the community that “I believe that our community standards should say that this is an appropriate way to deal with conflict”.<\/p>\n I don’t want that to be something that people in my community do.<\/p>\n People use pseudonyms for a lot of different reasons. Some people do for bad reasons, like separating unethical online behavior from their professional identity. But some people do it to avoid professional retaliation for perfectly reasonable behaviors – there are tenure committees at many universities that would hold blogging against a junior faculty; there are companies that don’t won’t allow employees to blog under their real names; there are people who blog under a pseudonym in order to protect themselves from physical danger and violence!<\/p>\n