The New Nation - Internet Edition

Iman Kurdi

Years ago, when I first started to write a novel, I decided that the only way to do it was under a pseudonym. Writing without the veil of anonymity just seemed unthinkable. It was akin to walking in Riyadh without the protection of my abaya.

This enraged a few friends who thought it not only cowardly but pretentious. At first I disagreed, later I came round to the idea that you must not publish anything, which you are not willing to own up to. Publishing after all is a public act, it is not a private conversation, and people have the right to know who is producing the words ?they are reading.

This week in London, a judge has ruled just that. It is the case of a blogger called Night Jack who wrote about daily life in a British police force. The blog not only was immensely popular, being read by as many as half a million people a week, but also won the rather prestigious Orwell prize. The writer had written the blog anonymously for 18 months, and then the Times newspaper unmasked him. Richard Norton, as we all now know his identity, went to court to seek an injunction against his identity being revealed. The court ruled no with the judge pointing out that publishing is a public act and that someone writing a blog cannot expect to have his identity protected.

Journalists have the right to protect their sources. Had a journalist wanted to write a piece about the daily life of a policeman, they could have interviewed Norton and then protected his identity. The law would have enabled them to do that. They could have made the same revelations and argued that it was in the public interest to reveal what goes on within the ranks of the police. Interesting, isn't it?

What is even more interesting is that it is a newspaper that ousted him, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch. Were they acting in the public interest as they claimed by revealing his identity or were they protecting their own vested interest? For a newspaper like the Times would quite happily have published a piece about the dirty work of policing from an 'undercover' source in the police. Could it be they object to being cut out of the deal? People can now publish blogs directly on the net and be read by more people than read the Times. Moreover, the most popular blogs are often anonymous blogs. Why are anonymous blogs so popular in the age of self-publicity? Just look at the recent rush generated by Facebook as people scrambled to register their own names as facebook addresses? We are living at a time when individuals are thinking of themselves as brands and everyone from Jo the Plumber to my teenage neighbour want to become stars by giving us blow by blow accounts of their daily lives. It is after all what people do on Facebook. It may have been designed for people to contact other people they know or would like to know - social networking - but it has become something akin to a shop window for everyday lives.

The difference is that the entries people post on Facebook are supposed to be private since you decide who is on your friends list and who is not. More importantly, an entry on Facebook is about Jo the individual plumber, whereas the anonymous blog of Jo, the plumber would be popular because it reveals what plumbers do but don't want ?you to know.

The popularity of Night Jack was largely due to the candid nature of Norton's writing. He was indiscreet.

He revealed details about cases he was working on, criticised politicians and other policemen, and generally said things, which would have been inappropriate for a policeman to say in public. And that is what it is all about. Anonymous blogs often flourish because they allow their writers to be indiscreet. But it would be wrong to consider this titillation. What makes these blogs so compelling is that they give us a firsthand account of a world we would otherwise not have the means to enter. They open closed doors.

Sometimes this is for the public good. Sometimes it is no more than well-written gossip. The difficulty is in finding the right line between the genuine need for anonymity, which protects people from being attacked for revealing something, which should be made public, and the lack of accountability of people who can publish anything they want, about anybody they like, without having to show any credentials.

Recent events in Iran have also shown the importance of both blogging and anonymity. In countries where the right to free speech does not exist, anonymity becomes a necessity. How else could we possibly know what is really going on? By giving us the opportunity to be a fly on the wall of ordinary people going about their business, blogs have opened up a whole sphere of experience to readers, which would have once been the preserve of novels and documentaries. However one does not replace the other.

Anonymity is powerful and must come with a health warning. It must be treated very cautiously by both the writer and the reader. At the end of the day, there must be a darn good reason for someone not to want to reveal their identity. In Norton's case, he was breeching police regulations and now faces disciplinary action. The blog has now been deleted in its entirety. But what do you bet a book deal will be signed before the year is through?