Fear of discovery

[brimtoast]

I feel like we should talk about this, in the light of yesterday's Last.fm scare and aftermath

I've thought a lot about fear of discovery, since one of my very earliest experiences in the world of podfic was seeing my favorite reader take down all her work because she was feeling too much anxiety at the thought of it being found.

My opinion, which seems not to be shared by many people, is that voices are not distinct enough for this to be a genuinely scary prospect (although if some people have extremely uncommon accents or voices, this would apply less to them). I feel like someone could discover my podfic, listen to it, bring it to me saying "IS THIS YOU?" (Actually, I have a lot of trouble imagining that step. I'm guessing they'd be too uncertain and embarrassed-if-they-were-wrong to actually ask) and I could say, "Nope, definitely not me. They do sound a lot like me, though! Weird." And nobody would argue or push the matter further.

And so I think that even though podfic feels more personally identifying because it's my voice, the fear of discovery is more a paranoia than a reasonable fear. I've heard people say podfic readers sounded "just like" their best friend, high school librarian, another reader they heard on a different site (this one was directed to me, and I never read for that site, so I know the person I sound "just like" was not actually myself). For most of us, there are people out there in the world with voices similar enough to ours to give us plenty of plausible deniability.

What do other people think?

Comments

[roga]

I think it also probably depends on how open you are about your life in your journal. Like, if someone suspected they knew you, they'd click on your LJ and see that it's empty, but other people might have other clues -- where they live, posts about their life and what they do, so if someone suspects it can pretty much confirm that. However, I don't know how probable it is that someone you know will DL a podfic you recorded and recognize your voice to begin with. It's a small comfort that if someone did do that, then the person who recognized them would probably be someone whose into fandom to begin with -- like, I assume the chances of your mom downloading random American Idol podfic isn't that high. But I can also visualize situations where that would be ore problematic, so... I do not know :-)

ETA: okay, and I just clicked the link to the last.fm thing, so forget that last part about needing to be in fandom to get to podfic :/

[brimtoast]

Actually, this is making me think about how I mention my grad program sometimes in the readers notes parts of my podfic, and how maybe I should go back through and edit that out. Because you're right, if someone thought it was me, the first thing they'd do is track it back and look for evidence to confirm that. And while voice alone wouldn't do it, other info could. I'm going to go through and double-check that now, actually.