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

[brimtoast]

Yeah, I guess what makes podfic different from fanfic is that someone's voice would be more likely to get a person-who-knows-them-in-RL's attention (in an "I know someone who sounds kinda like that") way, and if it got their attention enough, they could go to that person's journal and confirm. I think most of the time, if someone googled a person's fandom username with enough dedication, they could find enough hints about where the person lived, when the person's birthday was, etc., that they could confirm their suspicions, or at least make them a lot more solid.

It would take a decent amount of effort on the part of the person investigating, but I see how it is possible, even for me, to get discovered for podfic, not *solely* through voice, but through a combination of voice and other small clues.

I've been dealing with that by trying to remove identifying info from my journal, though. And maybe I could even imagine, if I got a really sensitive job (politics or whatever, as someone below mentioned), orphaning my podfic and locking down my journal so there was no username to track back from it. Maybe I would get an entirely new journal (if I felt the need for one) that had no association with my podfic, so I could still participate in fandom but not be connected to the podfic. What I would not do is take down the podfic, because I still very firmly believe that nobody could place me based on that alone. (And I have very strong feelings against people taking down things they have contributed publicly to fandom, for any reason less than a terrible life emergency).

[pandarus]

Yeah, I guess what makes podfic different from fanfic is that someone's voice would be more likely to get a person-who-knows-them-in-RL's attention (in an "I know someone who sounds kinda like that") way, and if it got their attention enough, they could go to that person's journal and confirm. I think most of the time, if someone googled a person's fandom username with enough dedication, they could find enough hints about where the person lived, when the person's birthday was, etc., that they could confirm their suspicions, or at least make them a lot more solid.

It would take a decent amount of effort on the part of the person investigating, but I see how it is possible, even for me, to get discovered for podfic, not *solely* through voice, but through a combination of voice and other small clues.

EXACTLY.

And, you know, who I am in RL is very much the same as who I am online - just, online it includes some NC17 bits in the fanfic I read and write - and that's the stuff that could totally bite me in the ass. But my interests, my writing style, my speech patterns, my humour - I mean, IF somebody were at the point of thinking "Shit, that sounds like Fay! And this is the kind of thing she would totally do..." and started playing detective, I think I'd be buggered. Everyone knows I love to read, write, act etc, and that I'm an internet geek, and podficcing is a combination of these things. Hell, I do this kind of reading-aloud-to-groups performance fairly often in the course of my job (just last week I was reading 'The Not So Jolly Roger' with great fervour and much brandishing-of-invisible-cutlasses and "ARRRRRR"-ing. It was awesome).

My RL/Fannish identity situation isn't some kind of Clark Kent/Superman thing. In RL, I'm pretty much exactly the same, only in technicolour (which in my case means looking like the bastard-child-of-Mary-Poppins-and-Doctor-Who, wielding parasols and colour-co-ordinated fans and singing absent-mindedly to jazz standards. Also, acting in the local community theatre productions in a variety of capacities - currently in a production which involves wearing nothing but a bath towel. Low profile just ain't part of my mission statement).

[brimtoast]

I guess one solution in a situation like this would be to post podfic under a separate name and never associate it with one's other username. But that, I think, would feel frustrating, because it's hard to be a fragmented person like that. Like, I've actually been actively trying to bring my fandom life and personal life together, talk to non-fandom friends more about fandom stuff, because if I leave out all the fandom stuff from my stories, my life starts to sounds kind of dull, like I have no hobbies or passions that I spend my free time on. And I'm proud of fandom, and of the ways I spend time in it, and I want to share that with (certain) people.

On the other hand, I do want to try to maintain that boundary where work is concerned. So it becomes a tricky line. I actually do have a separate journal for my podfic, and I think it's harder to trace that back to my RL identity... but then, on the other hand, it's not terribly hard to trace that journal back to this one, if someone were trying, and from this one to my RL identity is... still not totally easy, but slightly easier. I don't really know what to do about that in the end, except keep as many levels of separation as I can without feeling too constrained by them and keep a close eye on them so that if I did need to adjust, I would be able to do that.