Jerry Brito

Even more of the same (or the value of anonymity)

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Joanne inadvertently points me to a Washington Post article from a couple of weeks ago by James Marcus, a former Amazon.com editor. As it happens, a glitch in the Canadian version of Amazon uncovered the true identity of anonymous book reviewers for a couple of days. Among the bugs crawling under the lifted rock were many authors tooting their own horns.

Marcus’ point in the article, however, is to question the value of anonymity that sites like Amazon afford netizens. As is apparent from Amazon reviews or postings to your average message board or blog comments section, there seems to generally be an inverse correlation between quality commentary and anonymity. And this brings up the editorship problem that Dan Gillmor is thinking about. Marcus writes:

In a sense, it’s now the audience, not the editor, shouldering the burden of culling out the good stuff. Whether this represents a seismic shift in the cultural terrain or merely a fresh division of labor remains to be seen.

I’ve always been adverse to anonymity because it allows the authors of worthless comments to get equal billing with the writers of informative comments without ever putting their reputations on the line. But then I think of how well anonymity served the Founding Fathers in their writings. Ultimately, I think that private forums like Amazon and blogs will have to make a choice between quantity versus quality and thus decide whether to allow anonymity.

Marcus concludes hopefully by saying that the best amateur reviews and information will be found with bloggers, who usually aren’t anonymous and have “a name to besmirch, a reputation to smudge.” And as Gillmor would say, this is so even if they don’t have editors.

Apr 22, 2004 | Comments