Sunday, January 24, 2016

Those awkward aliases.

"No, no, the real name," said Holmes, sweetly. "It is always awkward doing business with an alias."

Yesterday, I mistook someone's real name for an alias. Why would anyone do such a thing? Well . . .

Sherlockians have liked their aliases for a very long time. Going back as far as the first issue of The Baker Street Journal, you can see Sherlockian founding fathers using a pen name on occasion. And once the Baker Street Irregulars started handing out investiture titles, the idea of Canonical nicknames among Sherlockian societies spread far and wide.

We like our Sherlockian nicknames, and they've been used in some odd places over the years -- one of the oddest was when an article in The New Yorker decided to spread dark rumors about a particular Sherlockian and use his B.S.I. investiture as a coy "we're not really saying his name" ploy. Which may have made their subject anonymous to the general public with no time to Google search, but to the rest of the Sherlockian community? Pretty obvious who they were casting aspersions about.

Because we never really hid behind our nicknames from the Sherlockian Canon.

Pen names still came up in places like the BSJ over the years, as some professionals felt writing about Holmes might reflect negatively on their professional lives somehow, but that practice went to a whole new level when BBC Sherlock came on the scene.

I remember the surprise at the very first 221B Con, both to many of the organizers and classic Sherlockian attendees, when a goodly number of the attendees wanted to be identified on their con badges by their Tmblr handles. The world of internet fan fiction, with so much of it "scandalously" erotic in nature, had brought a new reason for pen names, and many a new Sherlock Holmes fan was known only by a pseudonym. And that all made sense . . . in that circumstance.

But where it starts to get awkward, as Holmes would say, is when we start to deal with each other as human beings, outside of that specific context. If "carbunclebleucheese" suddenly shows up on your web doorstep with no bonafides, how seriously should you take them?

A few months back, I had a Sherlockian take issue with the way I expressed something in this blog, and, in addition to staying behind an alias, actually had their thoughts forwarded via a second aliased Sherlockian's e-mail, who added their own thoughts wrapped around the other alias's message, which changed the tone of the whole communication. What might have been one considered opinion turned into a couple of masked thugs jumping out of my e-mail to beat me about the head and shoulders.

It made things rather awkward in a situation that was awkward enough to begin with, and very hard to reply.

But one can't even single out the newer fans for the amount of alias-play strangeness these days, as one sees books and organizations expressing opinions and having personalities on Facebook and other social media quite a bit. Which, like the pen-names, makes sense to a degree . . . until it goes a bit too far and doesn't.

I'm not about to raise a cry to abandon aliases. They're a fun little part of our hobby. But like every other toy in our toybox, they have their time and place. But when one wants to be taken seriously, and have an honest discussion, the first thing one needs to be honest about is who they are. Especially when it reaches the point where one can not be sure what's an alias any more and what isn't, as happened yesterday.

Because as the great man once said, "It is always awkward doing business with an alias." Always.

11 comments:

  1. This post, coupled with a sit down I had with an old school Sherlockian this weekend, as well as finally reading Shreffler's "Elite Decotee" essay really made the rift between the two camps of Sherlockians clear to me. I've heard it referenced quite often, but as someone fairly new to all of this, I never quite understood the major differences. I'm someone who falls in between both camps and can see the validity in some arguments and ridiculousness in others for both sides. I hope that every opinion can have its place and keep Sherlockiana as one big, dysfunctional family without imploding itself.

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  2. Only once was I asked to pick a nickname (for 'The Mini-Tonga Scion Society) and I chose from SHOS 'Norberton', for '...this singular episode ended upon a happier note than Sir Robert's actions deserved,' and 'has now outlived its shadows and promises to end in an honoured old age.' Though I've never really used it, there it sits printed on a little membership card ... and only I know what it means!

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  3. You're not, by any chance, a straight white male, are you? Because DAMN you speak with the entitlement of one.

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    1. Thank you for helping me understand, McBean. Very kind of you.

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  4. (My apologies if I send this twice - my phone glitched earlier and my post disappeared)

    The use of an alias on the internet isn't new, by any stretch of the imagination. They exist for the safety and security of users, such as it can be, and to preserve some measure of anonymity. There are good reasons why people will not engage without one; those reason are as diverse as people themselves. It doesn't mean you should take them less than seriously, no matter the topic. Engaging in a public debate using their real name can bring consequences you know not of, and you are not entitled to know the real life identity of everyone you interact with on the internet. Frankly, dismissing those you find online out of hand because of this is your loss - I've found better, brighter, and more spirited engagement online than I ever found in person, and I'd never have been able to do so under my real name.

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    1. It just came once, so no worries there! Aliases on the internet aren't new, of course, but the cultural shift the internet has brought with it kind of is . . . especially to those of us who lived a large share of our adult lives pre-web. To me, there's only a certain level of depth I'm going to go in an exchange of trust -- and some ideas can only be expressed with trust -- with someone who is a stranger. And to me, even someone with a very established internet persona who has no real name is still somewhat a stranger. It makes me a little sad that there's better, brighter, and more spirited engagement online behind a mask. It shouldn't have to be so. But I guess that's the world that is, and I'm glad it's working for you. I still have some adjusting to do, but I'm working on it.

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    2. I appreciate that you say you have some adjusting to do, but one of the things I think that tweaked people w/r/t your post is the sense of "you're doing it wrong" that pervaded your position: "But when one wants to be taken seriously, and have an honest discussion, the first thing one needs to be honest about is who they are." You find the use of an alias to be a alienating, making the person you're talking with a stranger. I find the idea of giving someone, say, like you, my actual name a terrifying prospect. In a day and age where people are fired from their jobs for online activities; when someone can be taken to task over a careless remark by an entire world of people; when women especially are stalked, harassed, and abused online, do you honestly think that any of us would give up our RL identities so easily? I think not. If, perhaps, one day I were to attend certain events in person, I might attend as my RL name. But when my internet identity is so wrapped up in this name, when the people at 221bCon, for example, want to know who I am, this is it. Mazarin221b. This is who I've been online - in various iterations - for almost 20 years. I get to Con and I hear "MAZ!" in the lobby, and I know I'm where I should be - with my friends, who know me better than just about anyone else.

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    3. I agree that people should be allowed some anonymity on the Internet when publishing or airing ideas, but I only feel comfortable to a certain point having a discussion or debate with someone who I can't attach a name to. I can't see myself getting into an extended discourse with someone, my wife asking me what I'm doing and I have to answer, "I'm debating sexism with RonPaul2012Fan." At some point, the conversations I have on the Internet need to be backed up with the fact that there is a real life person out there, not just someone hiding behind an alias, looking to stir things up.

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    4. I agree that people should be allowed some anonymity on the Internet when publishing or airing ideas, but I only feel comfortable to a certain point having a discussion or debate with someone who I can't attach a name to. I can't see myself getting into an extended discourse with someone, my wife asking me what I'm doing and I have to answer, "I'm debating sexism with RonPaul2012Fan." At some point, the conversations I have on the Internet need to be backed up with the fact that there is a real life person out there, not just someone hiding behind an alias, looking to stir things up.

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  5. Interesting discussion going on here (and I'm flattered to be part of the inspiration about it).

    I think you're right, in part, that on the internet, it's very easy to hide behind a username or anonymity to make whatever kinds of (sometimes trolling or satiric) comments you want that don't contribute to a conversation, and there's the desire for actual conversation.

    At the same time, ocasionally on the internet I do use an alias. I'm a Sherlockian who attends the BSI weekend, goes to scion societies, and is a member of traditional Sherlockiana. I'm also a member of the Sherlock BBC fandom, and I admit I like my fandom and my shipping and my erotica from time to time. I need to keep those worlds separate, for a variety of reasons - one of them is that they're just two different groups of people with different interests and priorities. At the same time, as someone who is at the start of her career, associating my name with erotica on the internet is something that is indeed concerning to me - hence my occasional use of a pseudonym when I engage in more "fandom" practices (I do a similar thing at conventions dedicated to fictional "ships"). On more academic spaces, however, such as my blog, I go by my real name (the blog has an "about me" section that links to my academia.edu page, etc..)

    The other aspect of pseudonyms and usernames is that if you join a fandom community online where everyone is using usernames, then you start identifying people according to different categories. Instead of meeting someone and saying "they're a person of this gender and age who lives here," you judge them according to other criteria: what fandoms they're in, who their favorite characters are, whether they prefer to analyze the show by writing "meta" or writing "fan fiction." They build their online identities in different ways. They still have an identity, and it's possible to get to know them, but it's an identity that's built differently. I'm okay with that, because again, I realize that I'm not the only one that has personal/academic/career-related/other reasons for keeping my online identities separate.

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    1. Thanks, Anastasia. I've toyed with a few online identities myself, but they just never seem to stick. And I'm definitely a big fan of keeping one's worlds separate!

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