Anonymity

   I've been weaving in and out of multitudes of running blogs for the last several months now. Like I'm sure many of us have done, I've developed a few favourites and blogs I eagerly gravitate to whenever I am notified of new posts.
   In this way, I have formed a certain level of comfort and familiarity with this blogger and that blogger, their interests, their families in some cases, their occasional pains and occasional triumphs.
   A few weeks ago, I was happily faced with the task of nominating ten fellow bloggers for a Sunshine Award. This was not particularly an easy job because there are just so many good writers out there whose work I enjoy.
   What I found though is, after I picked which blogs I wished to nominate, that even though I was familiar with the blog, I didn't necessarily know the name of the person whose blog it was!
   At my age, little lapses in memory aren't too terribly uncommon but what I then discovered was that with some blogs the author's name was not first and foremost (or even necessarily there for that matter).
   I knew that I very much wanted to list the blogs I was nominating along with their authors' names so I scoured peoples' blogs from head to foot, checking through all their "About" pages and contact info. I ended up digging through their Facebook pages, if they had them, simply in search of real names. Finally, I was able to nail down all ten.
   At some point, though, I did begin to wonder if I was being perhaps overly investigative. I wondered if perhaps there was a reason why names weren't more prominently displayed. Was it a privacy issue? And were people going to be annoyed with me for going above and beyond in my search?
   The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that people weren't overly trying to be secretive if Brian (Who Only Looks Like Tech Nerd) Baker was able to track down their info using just his laptop and questionable skills. This made me feel a little better.
   All this did lead me to ponder blog anonymity.
   Some bloggers are happy to publish their names, their family member's names and pictures of all of them. Some will publish pics and only nicknames or sometimes just initials. Not surprisingly, people are a little more protective of their kids' identities, a bit of a sad commentary on the state of the internet today.
   For my own part, I'm pretty open with identifying myself and family members on both my blogs. The kids are all active on social media for the most part (which is not to say they're past the point of getting into trouble on it) and have had some schooling on safety and some of the pitfalls involved with what's appropriate or not.
  

In pondering the seeming anonymity of some blog authors, I have come up with a bit of a theory. I now wonder if perhaps the act of running somehow or other takes us outside ourselves and changes, in a small way, both our self-perception and perhaps even the way other people see us. I then wonder if shedding the names which have always tied us to our jobs, our homes, our schools and the humdrum of daily life allows us to more easily be apart from all that routine, if however briefly. It would be almost as if, having discovered that we have this superpower of RUNNING, that we now need the pre-requisite secret identity. "You seem to be running pretty fast today, Clark." "Oh, Lois, you say the most preposterous things!" 

Aah...the Batman I grew up with!

   A couple of times lately, though, I've kind of run into a reverse sort of anonymity issue while blog surfing. A couple of blogs I read regularly employ one of those widgets which keep track of visitors in real time and identifies them by the city they live in and more or less when they logged on. At first, I thought this was kind of cool, being a "visitor from London, Canada" on someone's blog. I remember once, though, when I left a blog and then went back to it and saw my previous visit still on their counter plus my new one! All of the sudden I felt like a cyber stalker lol! I consoled myself with the fact that there are actually three or four running bloggers from London (which, come to think of it, might be a blog topic some day) and that my visits could possibly be attributed to people other than just me showing up so often! Whew!
   Part of the whole anonymity issue for me as an old man who gets easily confused is the fact that there are so damn many of us and that there also seem to be so many recurring themes to peoples' blogs. Many of them concentrate on their fave colour (which, in a lot of cases, seems to be pink!) How many variations of the "Eat. Drink. Sleep. Repeat" style of blog title do we run across in a single day? Is it just my imagination or at some point about 25 years ago did a lot of parents start naming their little girls some variation of "Jen" or "Kristy"? And it really doesn't help me when two different bloggers end up using the same blog template! Not to mention the blogs that are written by anywhere from three to six different people and trying to sort all of them out...can't tell you how many times I've been reading a post I thought Dave wrote, only to find out it was Andrea (names have been changed to protect the innocent)! And, as an old man, I also have a hard time trying to keep track of which working mom it is who's also trying to raise a family, promote a healthy lifestyle and train all at the same time and, occasionally, with the help of God.
   All of this then, seems to contribute to an overall sense of anonymity.
   Now don't get me wrong, if any of these sound familiar or maybe even if they sound like you, then please don't be hurt or offended (I love you all), I point all of this out simply to demonstrate how 1: easy it is to confuse the elderly and 2: when once we thought we might be alone, we find that we are way more interconnected than we thought. I know that when I began to write my running blog I thought to myself hey, this is a pretty cool idea, I bet no one else is writing a running blog! How wrong I was!