Ideas
The ideas corner: Thus spake sprezzatura
Published 18 September 2006
Should journos be allowed to comment on their own work anonymously? Dan Rosenheck ponders
Journalists are not often the recipients of hero worship. So when someone called "sprezzatura" materialised this year on the web discussion boards of the US political weekly The New Republic, and started heaping praise on TNR's cultural blogger, Lee Siegel, eyebrows were raised. Sprezzatura first appeared after posters to the forum tore into Siegel for an item trashing the comedian Jon Stewart. "Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be," respon ded sprezzatura in a post entitled "Siegel is my hero".
Posters soon began to question whether sprezzatura knew Siegel - or indeed, as one noted, whether he was Siegel. After the magazine's editors confronted Siegel about sprezzatura's comments, he confessed to their authorship; this month he was suspended indefinitely and had his blog removed from TNR's site. "A magazine that hopes to preserve its credibility cannot permit its writers to misrepresent themselves," commented Franklin Foer, editor of TNR.
Surprisingly, many posters felt that the punishment was excessive, because anonymity is the name of the game on the discussion boards. "You have created a forum where presumably anyone who wants to sign up can say anything he likes under a pseudonym," one contributor noted. "Where is it written that these same rules shouldn't apply equally to TNR staffers?"
But there was still plenty of schadenfreude on the site when the axe fell. Although TNR's users seem laissez-faire about who posts on the boards, the codes about what can be posted there are much stricter. Anonymous or otherwise, the forums' users all participate because they are seeking some sort of intellectual enrichment, to share their views on articles published in the magazine and to hear others'. To remain anonymous, Siegel would have had to limit his comments primarily to the arguments on the boards.
But he had no interest in those arguments, because, apparently, he viewed their authors as "imbeciles" and "dishonest little phoneys". As one user wrote in a widely shared opinion: "Siegel should have been fired for his juvenile and stupid remarks, period." His real crime, in the eyes of TNR's online readers, was not his posting incognito, but rather his violation of the implicit code of conduct underpinning its discourse.
So, in sacking Siegel, Foer may have made the right decision but for the wrong reasons. He applied print-world standards of journalistic accountability to a writer's web conduct and sacked him for disguising himself, even though such insistence on faithful representation seems anachronistic on the web, where the concept of identity is more fluid. But this does not mean that the internet, as Siegel told the New York Observer, "is really cowboy territory, with very few boundaries". The anonymous TNR forums had very clear, if never formally stated, rules of engagement. When Siegel violated them, he lost his anonymity - and his offline job as well.
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