Sphinx

Despite all appearances – only two comments, one of them from me – my musings on the demise of Uwe Walter’s Antike und Abendland have sparked a certain amount of online discussion about the current state of the classical blogosphere – see for example David Meadows’ Rogue Classicism and Liz Gloyn’s Classically Inclined. One upshot of this is that I’m going to have to find some time over the next few weeks/months to consider whether I’m going to do anything more than bemoan the lack of serious research-focused debate and discussion of ancient matters on the internet, and if so what. Another is that I’ve had to embark on another of my periodic catching-up-on-what-tech-savvy-people-have-been-doing-for-years sessions, not least trying to improve my use of Twitter (I’d actually failed to notice that people were discussing what I’d said). This has already inspired one change for the new year, which you may or may not already have noticed at the head of this post…

As far as I can recall, I first acquired a proper online identity back in August 2006 when I started commenting on stories in the Grauniad‘s Comment is Free webpage. At the time, pretty well everyone used an alias of some sort, and there were (and still are) some cogent arguments about the necessity of anonymity, although there have subsequently been some equally persuasive ones about how much this encourages trolling; I did feel a certain amount of nervousness then about making political comments under my own easily-traced identity, and so adopted the alias Abahachi for commenting on the Guardian – even though I was more and more involved in the Music and Culture pages rather than the bearpit of CiF. I remain fascinated and impressed by the way that, especially within the little world of Readers Recommend, online identities took on substance as we all became familiar with one another, and online relationships became ever more real and multi-faceted. I count various of the people I’ve met through RR as good friends; some I’ve since met in person and we use (not necessarily consistently) one another’s real names, others are known to me and I to them solely through our online identities. True, on the internet no one knows you’re a dog; but since what matters is the person(a) you’re interacting with, and your history with them, it doesn’t remotely matter whether they’re a dog or not. I honestly don’t know how many of the people who refer to me on RR as “the prof” are doing this because they know my ‘real’ identity, and how many of them are simply responding to my online persona and the sorts of comments I write. Other than when we have topics like “Readers Recommend Songs About Ancient History”, and I have to muzzle myself from getting too pretentious and appealing to authority, this really doesn’t matter.

Readers Recommend spawned a spin-off blog, initially on Blogger and since on WordPress, The ‘Spill (for Overspill, as this was the place we could continue conversations that would be too tangential for the main thread). I therefore registered on those sites as Abahachi without a second’s thought, and it’s only gradually become clear that there might be a problem with this. Within that online community, I am Abahachi, and my offline identity is relevant only for occasional jokes and the odd request for professional advice (e.g. on university application procedure). On the Grauniad, it doesn’t really matter who I am as no one’s listening anyway. But where commenting and blogging starts to overlap with my professional existence, the gap between on- and off-line becomes an issue. At best, it’s slightly confusing: when I’ve posted on here as Abahachi, it’s easy enough to work out who I really am, but when I comment on someone else’s blog on WordPress and the system automatically logs me in as Abahachi, that’s less obvious – yes, it’s my picture, but that doesn’t help much if you’ve never met me. It’s still easy enough to work out my real identity if you want to, but it must be annoying to have to make that effort.

Obviously one option would have been to maintain a clear separation between online and offline me; part of me still wonders whether tying my professional identity to posts and comments is not in some way an illegitimate pulling of academic rank, whereas the ideas should be left to stand or fall on their own merits. But there’s a risk of appearing to indulge in some sort of sock puppetry, and in any case that would prevent any attempt at using social media for professional purposes – whether for self-advertisement or, more constructively, in a genuine attempt at developing the lecture theatre or research seminar of the future. The first step, in retrospect, was registering for Twitter as @NevilleMorley; given the way the system works it would have been absurd to do anything else, but it should have been a sign that the Abahachi persona has its limits in this respect. I also made the decision to comment on Crooked Timber as myself, and on other blogs have increasingly been signing in via Twitter; in fact, it’s just WordPress (and the Grauniad, but that’s less of an issue) where I’ve remained Abahachi – but since so many classical blogs, including this one, are currently on WordPress, that’s a problem, as the last few days have shown.

So, new year, new me; I now have to manage two separate WordPress identities (Abahachi is going to carry on commenting on obscure European free jazz and the like  for the foreseeable future), and – if all has gone according to plan – this post, subsequent ones on this blog and anything else I get up to in a personal-professional capacity (not an ideal phrase, but in the wake of the Eric Loomis affair I do feel distinctly nervous about the idea that I could be held to account by my institution for casual comments and tweets) should all appear under the name of NevilleMorley. A minor step, but better than nothing. Now, apparently, I need to invest in an iPad and work out how to use TweetDeck…