I am a sock puppet. I didn't know I was until recently but now I know what a sock puppet is I am proud to be one. Sock puppet can have two meanings. One meaning is rather negative, it is applied to someone who masquerades as someone they are not, by having multiple identities to achieve dishonest results e.g. having two eBay accounts and using one to bid-up the price of an auction listed by the other account. However, the other meaning, while close to the former, is for a person who uses the Internet or another medium to publicise something without fully revealing who they are. Right here, right now you are reading the blog of a Sun employee and would use this to balance your opinion of anything positive that I write about Sun - and there is lots to write at the moment - but I could equally post something positive about Sun in another form such as a personal blog on blogspot.com or in a web based discussion forum and you wouldn't know that I was a Sun employee.
So why am I a sock puppet? I recently wrote a letter in response to an article in a UK newspaper. The article was about an incident that occurred at my daughter's school, some of which portrayed the school in a negative way. I wrote the letter which was published on the newspaper's website in praise of the school, its staff and its policies stating, quite correctly, that we had moved across the country five years ago to get our children into better schools. I stated very clearly in the letter that I was a parent of a child at the school. What I didn't state was that I am also on the governing body of the school, and am therefore responsible with my fellow governors for the policies on which the school is run, including the policy at the centre of the incident in question. I wrote the letter as a parent. That I am also a governor was irrelevant to me in the context of the letter that I wrote. So there you have it, I confess that I am now a sock puppet, albeit an unapologetic one.
