At 01:22 PM 10/17/00 -0400, Ray Dillinger wrote:
Likewise, people who only understand speech and business mediated by absolute identities are going to have trouble with the "subtle" difference between anonymity and pseudonymity. It's a model where you are dealing with someone but don't know who they are, and as far as the sheeple are concerned, one not-knowing is as good as another. It violates the same assumption, therefore in popular view, it must be the same thing.
*sigh.*
Bear
I used to think so too, but there are a lot of hausfrau who use polynymy. They're not clued in to the subtleties of recognizing prose by style, because my informant has told me that they are recognizable. I doubt many cpunkly anonymous posters put their prose through a few cycles of 'the fish'. Perhaps short prose is their solution; what is *your* unicity distance? In a different but related thread, the whole point of 'human factors' studies and gui design is to use whatever the user brings with him --including metaphors from meatspace. Postcards = IP. Envelopes = crypto. Phone books = PKI directories. Multinyms = "doing business as". Reputation = reputation. dh