Sneaky, Sneaky
Published March 5th, 2007Look, I really, didn’t even want to comment on this hateful wretch of a human being. I won’t even type her name here - her name doesn’t deserve to be in “print” - she’s the worst kind of publicity whore. Yet the Republican party continues to allow her to speak for them by not denouncing her. Maybe they’ll start a little now.
But (maybe surprisingly) I’m not going to say much more on her and her recent comments. I think it is pretty obvious, given some previous posts here, how I feel about them. No, I want to draw attention to something in that CNN news article. It is truly a sign that the post-modern world has arrived. I can remember when I first started logging onto the internet. This would have been around, oh…1994/95 or so. One of the most important things you could do then was to get a cool handle. Do we even call them handles anymore? Guess not - I suppose they’re screennames now. The point is, this was a big deal! Cyberpunk fiction of the time was full of hip cyber cowboys with cool, one-name identities. The phenomenon showed up in the venerable neo-cyberthemed movies of the time - most obviously in that classic of classics, Hackers. AcidBurn anyone? LordNikon? See what I’m saying? I of course didn’t use the cooler-than-cool “cephyn” back then, it took me a few years to think that one up. But that’s the one that stuck.
I digress. Cool usernames, cool handles. It was a big deal. This was your identity. Famous hackers had them - some of them pretty outlandish. Cap’n Crunch. PhiberOptik. Dark Dante. Perhaps the most infamous hacker of them all went by “Condor”. When these black hats started getting arrested for their illegal doings, they were identified by their real name. The media couldn’t take these names seriously! At best, there might be one sentence mentioning the handle. Again, this was in sharp contrast to both speculative fiction of the cyberworld, where handles were a person’s primary name. And this was in sharp contrast now to the actual cyberworld at the time - your handle was your primary name online.
So back to the CNN article. As they talk about the first person to post contact information for advertisers, they identify him (or her!) by their handle.
“…the blogger VolvoDrivingLiberal wrote on DailyKos.com on Sunday.”
Look at that. A major news corporation has identified an individual, a “man on the street” of sorts, by their handle, and nothing more. And this is seen as OK! 10-15 years ago, this would have been unacceptable, laughable. How can you have an international news story where a source is only identified by a self-generated alias!? Well, obviously, now you can.
This of course isn’t the first time it’s happened in the media, but usually if a blogger gets famous, they are “outed” one way or another - see Wonkette and Groklaw. But this brings me to my final thought.
I recall reading “Ender’s Game” and thinking - why on earth would the world listen so closely, and how could the population be so swayed by anonymous - what would sort of be considered now - bloggers? Demosthenes? Locke? Who would trust a person who only goes by a screenname? And yet - 2007 is here, and anonymous-except-for-screenname bloggers are taken seriously. The future is now.
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