http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog On the intersection of libraries, politics, and culture Thu, 23 May 2013 15:13:50 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5 http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?page_id=3&cpage=1#comment-13 Rory Litwin Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:55:46 +0000 http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?page_id=3#comment-13 Thinking about it further, I think there are two separate things I’m interested in avoiding. The first is validating an illusion of intimacy that’s created when people share personal thoughts and details anonymously, which is what blogging using only your first name can do. In answer to that problem, I’ve heard some bloggers say “I only refer to people by their first names when I actually know them personally.” That rule at least “keeps them in reality,” so that when they refer to a person by name they know they are not referring to an anonymous internet entity. But then they are up against the second problem, which has to do with whether the audience knows that person by first name just as they do. Assuming that the audence does know who that person is kind of pretends that all the readers of your blog are a part of a community who know each other personally just as you know this friend whom you’re referring to by first name. I think a lot of people like to get that warm “in group” feeling from a blog, but it does involve a pretense and an illusion. People who encounter those first-name references without wanting to imagine themselves to be a part of a community of people who all know each other by first name experience it the way most of us experience it in real life when someone drops a first name – as rudeness. When someone drops names in a conversation with me, using a first name, and I don’t know the person they’re talking about – that is if I either don’t know who they are referring to or don’t know the person personally – I find it offensive. It’s a display of being “in” a group and a display of expecting you to know, if you are anybody, the ins and outs of that group. It says, “I know Tiffany, and of course you do too, because you and I are talking like chums.” People who do that make me feel like I’m back in high school. It’s less obvious that that’s going on when it’s the web, because so many people only identify themselves by first name in the first place, but I think it’s the same thing. So I would say I have this rule for both of the reasons you’re suggesting, though I would phrase it differently. I would say referring to people by first names on blogs both supports an illusion of intimacy in an anonymous environment and makes an inappropriate presumption of familiarity.

]]> http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?page_id=3&cpage=1#comment-12 Rikhei Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:36:48 +0000 http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?page_id=3#comment-12 I was wondering if you might clarify your first rule for me. Do you think that by using another blogger’s first name, one is being ambiguous about the person to whom they are referring? Do you think that by using the blogger’s first name, one is suggesting a certain intimacy that cannot exist in this environment? Perhaps I have misunderstood you entirely…

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