Tag social trends

While reading a post on another subject, I noted this interesting passage about the differences be Pseudonymity and Anonymity that I thought was worth pulling out.

I know that StAllio! has attempted to explain this to Gary Welsh at Advance Indiana in the past with mixed results.

You know what? Someone who mistakes pseudonymity for anonymity is missing just a few critical things about blogging that go right to the core of its importance. Pseudonymity is the maintenance of a consistent identity, one to which credibility–or lack thereof–attaches just like it does to the name Bob Cox or Marcy Wheeler. Anonymity is something different, one that doesn’t exist in any fully formed blog.

I’m sure you and I would disagree about this. But frankly, pseudonymity is one of the most important aspects to retaining the vitality of the blogosphere. Pseudonymity guarantees that citizens whose jobs or other life circumstances would not permit them to speak politically, to do so, using a consistent identity, but one that does not endanger their livelihood. This country was built on the importance of citizen speech–built by a bunch of guys writing as Publius. In this day and age, that critical aspect of our democracy is getting harder and harder to sustain. Blogging has brought it back, to a degree. And I, for one, don’t want to belong to any organization that discards such an important tool of democratic speech without even understanding the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity.

According to the New York Times, thousands of Japanese kids, mostly boys, are shutting themselves in their rooms and refusing to come out for years at a time. They hang out on the internet, watch television, play video games, and refused to come out for school, work or even meals. Because of the downturn in the Japanese economy, more young people are unemployed and live at home with their parents well into their twenties, and Japan’s unique cultural style of nurturing creates an atmosphere where young people don’t become independent.
Huh. If I had tried that as a teenager, my parents would have dragged me out of my room by my feet and kicked me down to the school bus stop in my pajamas.