Gender-Free Zone

Larry Summers has learned a lot in the past few weeks about the problem of judgment on the basis of identity over merit. On the one hand, his critics are concerned that he is encouraging society to evaluate women based on their gender and not on their intellectual aptitudes. And on the other hand, Summers himself has been judged, at least in part, not on the value of what it was he actually said at that now-infamous National Bureau of Economic Research conference (in point of fact we didn’t even find out the content of his remarks with any certainty until quite recently), but rather on his character as the president of Harvard.

I won’t weigh in on these particular issues: I’ll leave that to experts in the fields in question and the faculty at this institution. I would, however, like to pause for a moment to reflect on a different world in which this whole controversy seems rather silly—a world, I imagine, which Summers and his critics both are pining for right about now.

Mine is a world where identity is a fluid and invisible concept, ever-changing and unreliable, and thus where the only true qualifications a person has are the creativity of his (or her!) art and the strength of his or her argument. And lest you think I’m a dreamer, I’d like to point out that my world, or at least some facsimile of it, exists—and you enter it every time you turn on your computer and open your web browser or instant messaging client.

Anonymity on the Internet, and in particular gender anonymity on the Internet, has often been framed in a rather ugly light, marred as it is by media portrayals such as in the 2004 movie “Closer,” in which Clive Owen has a steamy romantic online rendezvous (can an online rendezvous really be steamy?) with someone he believes to be a woman, only to find out that it’s actually Jude Law. But this is anonymity nonetheless, and it is a powerful force in shaping who’s who on the net: when you can’t trust a person to be who they say they are, your only choice is to judge them on the basis of what they’re saying.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the Blogosphere (the name given to world of people with weblogs, those insanely popular online journals that exist at the intersection of diary, opinion column, and honest journalism). One example particularly close to home is the Apple Computer rumor-mill site “Think Secret,” run by the pseudonymous Nick DePlume, who (it was revealed last month in The Crimson) is none other than Harvard freshman and Crimson editor Nicholas M. Ciarelli ’08. Nick is affiliated with our well-regarded educational institution, and he’s male, but there’s no reason either of these things had to be true—he could have been a porpoise from Tahiti and none of his thousands of daily viewers would have been the wiser. Think Secret was and is popular because its content was accurate, interesting, and well-informed.

Of course, this is an over-simplification. Many of the most popular weblogs are popular precisely because they’re run by someone famous from the “real world,” like Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner or actor Zach Braff (director and star of the movie Garden State). But the point isn’t that identity buys you nothing online. Rather, it’s that identity is difficult to establish there, and so in large part the web is a meritocracy: it acts like an enormous lens, magnifying good ideas and things people like as the addresses of entertaining sites get bounced around over House open lists and swapped at office water coolers. Indeed the Internet is, along with American Idol, one of only a handful of cultural and social institutions which can make you famous and (potentially) widely respected, no matter who you are, whom you know, or who knows you.

It’s worth remembering that this isn’t always a good quality. American Idol had its William Hung (famous for his incredible dearth of singing talent) and the Internet has, among others, its Gary Brolsma. Gary, a hefty, likable 19 year-old New Jersey suburbanite, recently found himself catapulted into the public consciousness after a video he made of himself lipsynching and dancing along with a Romanian pop tune (he calls the video the “Numa Numa Dance”) met with unexpected popularity on the net. He enjoyed the initial rush, but as he’s become more and more of an icon he’s grown self-conscious and now is hiding out at home waiting nervously for his 15 minutes to end.

For Brolsma and for Ciarelli both, the Internet has been much like the Harvard tenure process: a ruthless and uncaring judge. It distributes great fortune in a way that to the eyes of mere mortals often looks plain capricious. I don’t know whether the tenure process is blind to identity—to lineage or gender or whatever—but the Internet most certainly is: on the net, somebody could be anyone, and it’s almost impossible to expose false claims of persona. And that means, among other things, that on the Internet, anyone—race, gender, and even sometimes talent and intellect aside—can be somebody, whether they like it or not.

Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.