Before I headed off into the ether for the night I read mathowie’s post on usernames. Go read it, I’ll wait…
Now Matt is a smart guy with lots of whuffie and all that, but in this case he’s wrong.
Having usernames or as I like to call them noms de net is important to having well balanced interaction with people on the internet.
Many of the newer users of the net that think that weblog comments are the end-all of personal interactivity may think it’s fine to use real names on the net for everything, but it’s not. I think they simply don’t know any better. I view the people who use FirstLast for a username the same way I view people that have aol.com addresses on their business cards. The just aren’t operating on the same plane as me.
There are many ways for people to interact on the net and they each have different social dynamics. Gaming interactions and weblog interactions are two wildly different beasts. Chat rooms and message boards even have different mentalities.
While you cannot ever be completely anonymous, with a few simple clicks you can be fairly untraceable. With enough resources and time, any information can be gathered, but to most people the barrier is too high.
There are many times when anonymity is important. Log into a game of Quake or Counterstrike with your real name, do some serious damage to people and sure enough you have hate mail in our inbox before you quit the game.
Consider games like Everquest or Ultima Online, where much of the politics of the game takes place on message boards. Use your real name there and people will be calling you on the phone complaining about why you PKed them in the game.
Interested in some ‘alternate lifestyle’? Are you going to use your real name?
Chatting in IRC with a bunch of strangers? Are you going to use your real name?
Yes, people could try to track you down, looking for connections, but they don’t in most cases.
I’m sure you all could track down my two main nom de nets in a few seconds, but there are several names I use that no one but my wife knows. Hell, I’ve got websites that none of you even know exist. Any you can’t even find them due to the way I’ve registered them. You can’t google up a connection, believe me, I’ve checked.
Anonymity has it’s place on the net.
People want to be something other than they are in real life on the net. How can I be the valiant swordsman online in a game and be named MichaelPusateri? The net for a large part is about fantasy. They fantasy of being an expert, the fantasy of being a sexpot, the fantasy of being anything but yourself.
To give in to the flavor of the of hour and use FirstLast as your username is dull, boring, and quite mundane.
Have some fucking style. Have a damn story about your name. Disconnect, just a little bit, from the real world and live a little.
6 thoughts on “Nom de net”
Comments are closed.
Mike, you’re comparing apples to oranges. Gaming is a completely different environment.
I’m saying that in the world of blogs, and blogs alone, the previous convention of using your clever username (that you probably had to get in college and kept using it long after) seems to have gone out of fashion so much so that I’m often the sole person doing it.
Now granted, my use of a username never was based on anonymity. Since that’s a non-issue for me, I’m simply saying the winds of change are blowing, and I’m about ready to stop using it altogether, especially in places where usernames are the exception to the full name rule.
Does that mean everyone should abandon them for all uses online? Not at all, but for my purposes, I’m phasing it out on blog comments.
Mike, Matt is on the right track as far as my personal experience is concerned. It has nothing to do with anonymity because there is already so much personal information available on the ‘Net that I feel there is no need to hide who I am. For me, my first name, in all lowercase, has become my identity. It is the first Unix username I ever used and has been the one I’ve used ever since. Hence, ‘ethan’ is how I identify myself. When it comes to logins for places where ‘ethan’ won’t work (need a longer username; ethan taken already; etc) AND people will never be seeing my username in any kind of post, only then might I use a FIRSTLAST naming convention. And of course for any circumstances which don’t fit even those two scenarios I go with OceanTrvlr. 🙂
I have to agreed to some extent with both arguments. I personally prefer the use of a username because I feel it gives me some sense of individuality, something my RL name does not. I don’t really care if someone finds out my real name or not, I have nothing to hide.
I will probably always use my current username because I feel as if it is who I am to some extent. It is as intertwined with my identity as the name my parents gave me at birth, perhaps even more so. It says something about who I am, rather than who my parent saw me being.
It varies from place to place. In some communities the use of nicks is still expected. There are millions of livejournallers using made-up names (with varying degrees of artfulness), mostly because the software doesn’t allow spaces. But there are also hordes of ezboard users who all seem to use nicks, though the ezboard code lets you use arbitrarily long names with spaces. I suspect, though I have never tried to measure this, that any web-community system that attracts a significant number of AOL users will tend to be dominated by nicks rather than real names, since AOL (last I heard) still limits the maximum length of a username and is so overfull that practically everyone’s real name is already in use anyway.
It does seem that nicks have come to appear trivial, and that serious, grown-up parts of the web expect real names.
One other piece of old BBS- and net-culture that seems to have vanished is the practice of using people’s nicks when you meet them in person. This is such an old habit for me that I have a hard time even remembering someone’s “offline name” at a social gathering if I originally met them through their nick. But people these days seem to think it’s really weird if I call them by the name they’ve chosen. (How they think I’m supposed to discover and remember their real name when they never actually use it online, I have yet to understand.) But the change this signals is actually pretty cool. Once upon a time, you met one group of people in “real life” and a different group of people on the ‘net; now, apparently, people’s social circles overlap enough that they feel like they have the same identity everywhere. Everyone’s a netter now.
Instead of dropping my nick, I ended up dropping my original name. I felt more at home in it, and everyone I knew called me Mars anyway. This was rather less unusual back then than it seems to have become, and I have the feeling that in ten years if I tell people my name wasn’t originally Mars Saxman they will not understand at all.
(I had to think for a few minutes about whether I wanted to actually say that, given that it is bound to show up on Google… what a change from five years ago, when I felt I could say anything anywhere.)
I’ve read the article.
The deal is, in ‘directed communities’, such as game message boards (eq etc) and tech joints (slashdot), one tends to portray a very narrow persona.
For exampe:
That just sounds plain ridiculous if I use ‘Yoshi’ in there.
How about:
Likewise, putting Chakyu in that sentence sounds perposterous.
I’m both of those identities. I am the Human called Yoshi. I’m also Chakyu, a level 55 Human Monk on the Nameless server in the game EverQuest.
Blogs are typically more oriented toward Humans and Human activities. It makes total sense to want to be known as ‘you’ in the Human context. Aint nothing wrong with that.
However, if I was a member of some L337 woodworking blogging guild, I’d want to be identified by DoveTailMasterG.
I guess I can see that people want to appear more real in the weblog space. Point taken.
It seems that I tend to get my rant on when I hear that one part of the internet is shaping the behavior of other parts of the internet.
The thought of weblog etiquette taking over the rest the net makes me a bit nervous.