technoculture203-09

I found the notion about anonymity of bloggers quite interesting because many people seem to think that they can do or say as they like on their blogs because they think that they are anonymous, but in reality, they only feel anonymous. The reality is that no blogger is actually anonymous. The technology exists where internet users are able to be recognised and tracked down. In order to have a blog, you have to sign up to a blog space and give out certain personal details which you can choose to appear on your blog or not. Although these bloggers may appear anonymous and cannot be identified by their readers, the fact remains that they can be easily tracked down. An example of this is the anonymous blogger who called a celebrity model a “skank” and is now suing Google after they released her identity when demanded by the law http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/2782492/Identity-of-skank-blogger-revealed . On another website, an anonymous blogger was forced to share her identity after people started to figure out who she was. Once she had made her identity public she lost her job due to her blog and what she had been writing about http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/21/outing.anonymous.bloggers/index.html. So even if a blogger feels anonymous, majority of the time they actually aren’t being anonymous as it is easy to track them down or they are forced to make their identity public when the public gets close to working out who they really are.