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

[tinypinkmouse]

If anyone who knows me in RL listened to my podfics I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be hard at all to figure out it's me (but I can't really see most of those people listening to podfic). I do have something of a distinct accent and what's more there's a short podfic that I've read in English, Finnish, Swedish and also my very distinct dialect of Swedish. So anyone who knows anything about those languages shouldn't have much trouble figuring out I'm Finnish and with the addition of my dialect... yeah, narrow it down to very specific region of Finland. I didn't think about that when I did it, not until someone actually did connect the dots, though not someone who knows me in RL so they still didn't know who I am. Thankfully it doesn't really matter to me much if I'm discovered (if it did I probably would have realised how easy I was making it for people).

To be honest I have a bit of trouble understanding why it's so horrible to some people if they were connected to their fannish existence. I can see it could be a bit awkward, but... I mean it's not that I don't get the reasons when someone explains them to me, I just don't have any personal experience of that kind of situation. I just can't imagine any kind of serious consequences for me, neither in personally or professionally (well, I did start studying again, so maybe I'll feel differently some day). I mean I ran my reading of an nc-17, non-con, wincest podfic through my mom and dad before posting it to find out if I sound normal while reading it (to be fair, neither of them are fluent in English so I can't say how much of it they'd get, I was checking my tone of voice not the content).

[tinypinkmouse]

And I get that, especially when someone explains it. It's just that that kind of situation is completely out of my own realm of experience.

Not that I think people need to explain themselves, if somoeone doesn't want the two to mix in any way, then obviously that's their choice. And it's not like I'd be totally comfortable with some people in my life knowing about some of my fics/podfics.

[pandarus]

Right. Well, I'm glad to have helped expand your horizons a little there. And that done, I'm going to delete that information, as it doesn't serve any further purpose.