Private faces in public places/Are wiser and nicer/Than public faces in private places* (Discuss)
Thinking about anonymity, internet personas, social capital, different spaces etc (following furore on whether people who use pseudonyms online as opposed to real names or own initials are sneaky cowards).
I have an online presence (via listservs, website, etc) in what is essentially my historian/archivist capacity, with some divagation into the world of sff.
However, a lot of that relates to my public professional life and I think of LJ as a different, informal, social space, which is not the library or the seminar room, and I don't necessarily want people stalking me following me from those spaces into my front room or even into the pub in which I'm socialising with friends. On the other hand, I don't keep that part of my life a dead secret from my LJ world and pretend I'm someone entirely different. (Except for the hedgehog thing.)
As far as names go: mine is fairly common and there are least two academics in fields not particularly distant from my own who have the same one, with the same spelling and all, and both possibly occasionally get irritated at people who think that they're the one who does syphilis, masturbation, etc, in historical context.
So even if I used my own name it wouldn't necessarily indicate anything about who I was: and: what does a name mean, anyway? I have been to academic conferences in my area when people have said 'So you're - -!!', but there are huge swathes of spaces even within the general disciplinary field where I don't suppose my name is even recognised, let alone carries any particular weight.
The social/cultural/intellectual capital accrued to a persona in one space isn't transferable to other spaces (this is a bit like writers' Russian royalties in roubles under the USSR, which they had to go there to spend). You have to accrue that capital within each particular space, though it can help to have friends or at least acquaintances who are already there (though that can also work the other way...) You can't go around saying 'Don't You Know Who I Am?' all over the place without people coming back and saying 'Who are you?' - and even if they do know Who You Are, what they may know is 'So Up Themselves They Can See Their Tonsils From Below'.
Most people aren't exactly the same person in all conceivable interactions: we all have personas (I will invoke That Really Helpful Archivist Helping Clueless Enquirer, vs Snarky Archivist Bitching To Colleagues). They are not lies, they are different expressions in different circumstances.
And re the sub-furore of whether having personal negative issues with other parties (ever) means that one should recuse oneself of any intervention in a matter at all.
Okay, there are cases when there might be personal grudges being worked off: but there are also cases in which a personal history of problems can be seen to fit into a larger pattern of bad behaviour.
A couple of cases of my own are of a book I reviewed and a thesis I examined, in which my amour propre was significantly wounded by the failure to acknowledge or cite my work in ways I thought appropriate. However, in the case of the book this was clearly part of the general strategy of claiming a far greater originality than was actually the case by occluding a significant number of earlier contributions to the field which it was, however, clear were known to the author; and in the case of the thesis was part of a wider failure to engage with a fairly substantial amount of existing secondary literature. (Though I suppose I would say that, wouldn't I?)
Sometimes one's own experience is part of the evidence.
*W H Auden, The Orators (1932), dedication to Stephen Spender