Vagueness: Audience Construction

The more vague a representative image is, the more likely it is to agree with a larger statistic.   Cartoons as agency helps to capture a larger audience.  As icons of ourselves, cartoons speak to the audience (heh, though without speaking at all) as a form of agency.  And with the vagueness of facial features coupled with a simple cartoon, a very large audience is constructed because a larger number of people can relate to a cartoon with vague facial features than a cartoon with very defined facial features, let alone an actual spokesperson.  This is a valuable tool indeed.  I have noticed though, as I implied before, that so many people are able to relate to cartoons with vague facial features because of that vagueness. 
How might one apply such vagueness to written discourse then?  Anonymity, pseudonyms, even.  I cannot shake the notion that this is one of the reasons that some authors choose to write anonymously or under pen names, or are otherwise ambiguous. 
If the author and/or their characters are nameless, faceless, or otherwise ambiguous, a much larger statistic can buy into it because the more vague a character or author is, the easier it is for the audience to relate.