I was just reading in the Times about how many news organizations are in the process of changing their online comments policies to require, inasmuch as possible, that those who want to comment identify themselves.  Could the era of internet anonymity finally be coming to an ignominious end?

If only people took the effort to make their anonymous selves more interesting than the ones we know, but all anonymity seems to do is intensify their already fairly awful selves and bring out the worst in them.  The internet is a testament to both the heights and the depths of imagination, innit? 

And really, the internet is the least of it.  Anywhere people can get away with bullying, boorish behavior without having to pay a price for it they do.  Tea Parties and traffic jams are two perfect cases in point.   

We have all had our experiences on either end of anonymity, of course.  Anyone who blogs, or even posts comments on a news site, has been flamed.  And, come on, admit it, you've flamed out a couple times yourself.  It goes without saying: in the name of truth and justice.  Sometimes it can't be helped.  It can even be cathartic, speaking truth to, um, impotence.  But over time, most of us learn that throwing our lot in with the serial flamers — well, you start to feel like Ted Kaczynski. 

When you feel a flame coming on count to ten, take a walk, reboot.  Better yet, if you feel like flaming out, why not toggle to xtube and masturbate instead?  I truly believe: self-love could rid the world of hate.

There are a lot of lonely people out there, for sure, and comment threads provide them with just the kind of company misery loves.  My favorite comment thread, if I'm at work, say, and have a little time to kill, aside from anything on slog, is the Globe's Love Letters, an advice column ably presided over by Meredith Goldstein, for which she actively solicits comments from the peanut gallery. 

The threads are robust, with comments routinely running into the several hundreds, and seem fairly well moderated for profanity and the like. But somewhere along the line they go self-consciously off-topic, often utterly devolving into in-jokes among a few "regulars".  And let's face it: there's always something a little, um, irregular about "regulars".  
 
Those threads are mostly harmless, I have to say.  But especially where there are politics in play (or Barney Frank is involved) you start to see the internet's icky underbelly.  If people could remain anonymous without going nuclear it'd be one thing, but I have to agree with Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts that "comment streams," as he calls them, have become “havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness and plain nastiness that shocks the tattered remnants of our propriety.”

Of course, there's a whole generation now that doesn't know what things were like back in the days before our sense of propriety went up in flames.  It's been sixteen years since John Seabrook captured the birth of the phenomenon in a brilliant piece for the New Yorker.  I remember reading about his "first flame" with a sense of excitement and foreboding.  This was years before blogging came about.  Email was just coming into common use, and often proved too tempting for those hot-button issues.

When I had my Metro column  I started to get a taste of flaming firsthand.  And after blogging pretty much daily for the last four or five years, I feel like an expert.  I will say that, blogwise, the flames have gotten less flamey over the years.  It used to be I'd check in to moderate comments and I'd just have random "you're a douchebag"s in my box waiting.  No reference to anything specific, just: "douchebag".

When I was writing op-eds, I had one guy call me at home — back when I still had a land line and a listed number (because an unlisted number was five bucks more a month) — and leave me a threatening message.  Unfortunately for him, his name and number popped up on my caller i.d.  So I posted it, along with the following:

I don't know if Mr. ______ knows that writing a weekly opinion piece is not a criminal offense, but making threatening phone calls is. It’s called criminal harassment and it is punishable by imprisonment in a house of correction for not more than two and one-half years or by a fine of not more than $1,000, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

Mr. ______ turned out to be a college kid who was using his dad's phone.  His dad happened to be a prominent Providence businessman with the same name as his son who was concerned that now when you googled him you found the family name coupled with the unflattering phrase "criminal harassment."  He assured me he had had a talk with the boy, and asked me to consider redacting his name and number.  Which, being a reasonable guy, of course I did. 

Yes, those were the days.  There's still an occasional spark — like this one from just last week — but nothing like back then.

It's easy to forget that it was indeed once utterly unacceptable to say most of the things people say in public, often under the cloak of anonymity, nowadays.  And we're still negotiating where the line is.  Blogging, despite its ubiquity, is hard to pin down.  It's not, nor does it pretend or aspire to be journalism.  At its absolute best It's equal parts shameless confessional and evil gossip-mongering.  So flames sort of come with the territory, I guess. 

Because bloggers are tireless self-promoters, there are few blogs worth the read written by Anonymous.  And let me tell you, when you're out there publishing under your own name, sometimes you get desperate for a little good press.  A few months ago I got a very kind comment to my facebook account about a sort of flamey post I'd written on my blog a couple years before.  The message was from the very person whose newspaper article I had ripped in the post. 

We had never met (and still haven't), but Boston being Boston, it turned out we were about half a degree of separation from each other.  We had actually lived on the same street, but in different eras.  Our worlds overlapped like a gay venn diagram ...

I got several flamey emails in my box in response to my post, from folks I may or may not have slept with, who may or may not have harbored some kind of grudge (I myself am not a grudge holder, even if your penis is much, much smaller than advertised, you are actually a total bottom, and you think you're butch but giggle like a girl — I mean, whaddya gonna do? Welcome to Boston!), which I had no qualms about adding to the thread.  With proper attribution and acknowledgment that they had actually been emails to my private address rather than coming through the blog, of course.  No one complained.  And I certainly had no use for them clogging up my yahoo box. 

Fast-forward a couple years to this friendly facebook message from this fellow saying that he had appreciated me calling him out*.  Needless to say, having endured some criticism myself, I was gratified that my unsolicited advice had been of some use to him.  Not to play the victim, but I don't think it was wrong of me to have felt slightly vindicated after my drubbing over his drubbing.  But why hadn't he posted it to my blog?  As Mark Twain once said: “It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off.” So I took it upon myself.  Needless to say, with proper attribution and acknowledgment that it had actually come to me via facebook.

By way of mea culpa here: I did not ask the permission of the author, knowing, as he subsequently confirmed in another facebook message to me, that had he wanted everyone to see it he would have posted it in the thread himself.  But what about what I wanted?  His original message was a part of my narrative now, a full-circle moment for my Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Of course I removed the comment in deference to him.  It was sincere and heartfelt and I had been a heel to expose him.   Journalistic ethics absolutely forbid my doing what I did, but blogging is still — and rightly — in a gray area.  Still, as I explained to him (via facebook, of course), I should have respected fair use practice in either consulting him before posting his comments in toto, or creating a new post about the old post in which I discussed his comments without quoting him at all, which is, for those of you still paying attention, what I have opted to do here.

I do love a good lesson at the end of the day.  And the moral to this story?  Anonymity is not just for those who want to flame you.  It's also for those who want to thank you for flaming them.
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*5/14/2010 - Aw balderdash!  I just noticed this dude defriended me :(