Right about now, I was supposed to be at the University of Jordan’s Center of Strategic Studies presenting my opinions on “The Internet and Socio-Political Life in Jordan,” conveniently the title of the workshop I was invited to participate in. Obviously, I did not attend.

The reason I did not attend was primarily to preserve my partial-anonymity. The invite came in my nickname “Tololy,” which was something I found very interesting because there I was, receiving an official invite not in my official name but in the name I chose for myself. I thought this was a very interesting alteration of traditional boundaries (call yourself a name long enough and you will get official invites from institutions addressing you by it).

As I was saying, I wanted to preserve my anonymity by not attending. I normally respond to emails asking for my opinions on issues, and I even meet up with people whose cyber-personalities interest me, and many people who read this blog know me either in person or at least know my actual name. Therefore, my anonymity is a puzzling concept; very blurry around the edges.

However, this invite to appear in person in front of a crowd and introduce myself as “Tololy” was definitely a break in my cyber-life routine. It meant that I would have had to discuss issues with people who saw me right there in front of them but did not know my name, indeed, could not know my name. The situation as I imagined it in my head would have been bizarre, or at least pretty uncomfortable.

This is one disadvantage of being anonymous online. It is easily surmounted by temporarily revealing your true identity in such occasions, a thing I would have done had I not been entirely busy today and technically unable to attend that workshop. So, yes, there were other reasons why I did not attend. But for future reference, I will have to design a way to appear in person in speaking-engagements without trespassing on my anonymity. Speaking-cat hologram maybe?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 11:13 am and is filed under Metablog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.