The Lair

I’ve been lurking around Facebook again. The fancy seems to strike me in fits and starts. I resisted for as long as I could but I am now gripped in the throes of addiction. Well, I still don’t know what people actually do there - but like the cat chasing the feebly squeaking mouse because it can - I too have launched myself head-first into the Facebook era.

Sans a picture, though. There are limits to my online perversions. There have been odd wall posts berating me for not including a photograph. It’s Facebook - because you’re supposed to have photographs. Of your face. Who knew? If my face were akin to an open book of any sort, it would most likely be illegal.

But it’s sociable to include a picture of one’s face, apparently - and social networks are all about being sociable and quantifying relationships.

Facebook interestingly also asks for a quantification on a friend relationship. But not everyone wants to link up their blog (or blog reading habit) with their persona on Facebook. In fact, a friend (who asks to remain nameless) invents a mythical aunt to gloss over a blog inspired befriending. Someone else makes a reference to the northern territory of a continent to explain a befriending. In fact, Facebook does not include “I know this person through the web” as a standard answer.

Does it matter?

The degree of success in separating the pseudonym from the real world - such as it is - is found in the percentage of friends in my profile that I first met online. I make my personal percentage somewhere around 25%. Not bad. Not great either. This basically means that there is at least a 25% encroachment on my “real” life by my moniker(s) online.

I am also frequently torn between the two (almost diametrically opposed) extremes of not caring about merging my online and real-world personality; and my desire to keep those two separated just in case. I’ve realized that it is a cyclical thing. When I started on what I’m doing now - the odds were incredibly high that some random conference attendee would use Google to discover my contact details. Real name leads to a blog? Well, that could be fairly problematic. It actually happened, much to my embarassment.

Now? It’s much less a problem. Most of the people who need to get in touch tend to write direct to my “official” mailing address. Sadly, the spammers have found my real mailing address too.

Even so, my real world identity is my bolt hole - even if it’s unlikely that I’ll need an escape hatch from this particular identity. It’s possible to reinvent oneself from an online identity, but much harder to reinvent an association or connotation made with a real name - as some people have discovered to their cost. Even worse, unless there is an obsessive attention to detail - even the best psedonymous blogs tends to leak snippets of vital information at one point or the other. It could be oh-so-innocuous - the location in which one works, a past school, a stray link from another site which connects the real identity to the pseudonym. In fact, maintaining complete anonymity while writing a personal blog is extremely difficult.

On the other hand, the positives of a good reputation are many, and I would think that a lot of people are attracted to the potential for fame and fortune being attributed to their real name. Do many people consider the downside? Perhaps not.

And in conclusion - I yearn for the days when one could wander into a Usenet newsgroup or IRC channel and see a range of nicks and pseudonyms (some inane, some funny, some bombastic) and not really care overly much about the person sitting behind the keyboard. Like this commentary in reverse, actually.

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