With you on most of this, but isn't anonymity through usernames orthogonal to the discursive/dialogic shift (hey, turning a discursive text into a dialogic one!

With you on most of this, but isn't anonymity through usernames orthogonal to the discursive/dialogic shift (hey, turning a discursive text into a dialogic one!)? I'm thinking specifically in the context of an early 00's forum, people had their usernames but if you spent time on the forum and it became a community, you "knew" the people behind those usernames through the dialogue you had with them on the forum. You might have no real name or face to associate it with, but you understood how they thought and felt about things, what their interests were, and that kind of thing. And it's true that a parent post would start discursive, but it would often be an invitation to dialogue. It's sort of like if you're at a party with everyone in the world, and groups start forming around conversations people find interesting, with people constantly drifting in and out of the conversation with less regard for whether you actually know anyone in the conversation than people exert in physical space.