I think there's a mouse in my room

While I know the directions for this blog post were to find a blog focused on the academic or on theory, a posting I just read on my usual blog seems to fit this assignment perfectly. This article from the sports blog Deadspin, which operates out of Gawker media, provides an interesting take on the pseudonymity and anonymity the blogworld gives us, in this case on the topic of race. The author of the article, Will Leitch, does a good job explaining the background of the issue he's discussing, the last four paragraphs are particularly of interest. Leitch counters the idea of a growing "angry white man" culture with the idea that people simply are taking advantage of being anonymous in a public forum to voice their unpopular and offensive opinions.

He goes on to describe how blogs begin to take the shape of their author, which I think Barthes or Foucault would disagree with. While the author may be putting their opinion into their work, their personality is not a part of their writing, they are removed once they click post, just as I will be removed from this post. The idea that bloggers and commenters have the anonymity that newspaper columnists or authors of books often don't have allow them to say things they may feel deep down but would never express to others, for better or for worse. In this you have to wonder does the blogosphere change the idea of authorship altogether? In this new medium, people no longer have to have accountability; granted people have been writing under pen names for centuries, but not in the numbers that people are today. Millions of people have been empowered by this new anonymity and are becoming "authors", which may be redefining the concept as many "readers" are now also "authors".