Excellent plan; and you can bulk-buy birthday cards!
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You’re a different person depending on your social circumstances. How you act with your friends is different than how you act with your co-workers and different than how you act with your family and so on.
This is a natural part of being human.
So this Real Name policy being pushed by online social media companies is wholly unnatural to how we interact socially in our everyday life to say nothing of impeding the freedom to express opinions or report uncomfortable facts without putting your personal life at risk.
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For those that have been able to create multiple Facebook accounts (for different personalities), has Facebook tried to get you to connect them? Seem like it would be creepy in a similar way as FB trying to connect sex workers with their clients.
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I was raised by paranoid kooks who thought the government was listening in all the time, which more or less made infosec/opsec second nature. Only reveal as much as needed, if you reveal personal information, obfuscate it with false but equally probable statements, etc.
Of course when social media started becoming “you must have it” popular, those old lessons still hung in my head and I just never picked it up. As per people around me, first I was uncool, then a Luddite, then “kind of a hipster” and eventually I was a “hipster asshole” for not having a Facebook account. I don’t talk about my social media abstinence unless its relevant, and I don’t present it in a judgmental way. Instead, I think those assessments were just reflections of the amount of pressure people felt to participate in a thing, and at a certain point the pressure to conform was so high for most people that when they met someone who was like, “nah, I don’t do Facebook or anything” they became outraged less because of my non-participation, and more because my non-participation and apathy in general toward social media meant that I basically get to opt out of all that stress.
There have been periods in my life when circumstances were such that I was feeling extremely isolated, and the temptation to find a way to connect with other people in even a superficial way was great, even if that meant social media. I almost did it a couple of times before deciding that it would ultimately amount to something I’d regret.
It’s a good thing too, I think. Nowadays the attitude people have when they find out that I’m not on Facebook, Twitter, etc. the response is now generally something more along the lines of, “that’s lucky.”
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This kids are onto Old man Zuck
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Funny that. We hear about how kids these days have no concept of personal privacy, and in some ways their barriers are a lot different than people from even 10 or 15 years ago, yet it’s people who are middle-aged and beyond who seem to have the least regard for their privacy.
In the former case, kids’ boundaries are different now, that might not be a bad thing, it really depends on how shitty we let the world get, but they’re not unaware of the value of privacy–they might not understand the full extent of how much they’re parting with by participating in social networks, but they at least still possess an understanding of social compartmentalization and the enormous value and necessity of being able to “be a different person to different people.”
I don’t know if that is something that a lot of people lose as they get older or what. I’m into middle age and I still “get it” but my peers, mid-30s to late-ish 40’s, are all far more “promiscuous” about sharing information about themselves, their lives, and even their immediate thoughts and feelings than any of my younger friends.
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Yes.
To the extent I was raised by any human being*, the most influential people in my early life were AIDS activists who taught me that the right to privacy is the most important right I have. That my boss, landlord, school admin have no say over what goes on in my bedroom or my doctor’s office. Which is why the idea of real names freaks me out. Yeah, I use a tissue of a pseudo, but that’s because I’m comfortable with what I say. If I need to be locked down again, I can do it.
*Cats did more of the socialization; parents were… not really present. Fortunately, smother was a drama llama, and glommed onto a cousin’s HIV status because attention, which got me into a strong community by accident.
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I was raised by cats too! No kidding. A therapist once told me that it was rare for someone like me to not be worse off because people need some kind of consistent demonstration of acceptable affection. I honestly answered that I thought the “person” who provided that most consistently was the cat I grew up closest to (whom my father eventually killed through abuse and neglect when I fled my home – sadly I could not take the cat with me but it helped me cope when my grandmother fell into his care (for financial reasons he was determined to be her “caretaker”). No one could get her out of there dear god did his sister try, but I realized that by trying I was only perpetuating the system he controlled. The only way to freedom was death or absence. I chose absence. But pretty much everything I learned about closeness, comfort, love, and trust came from a cat.
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I was raised by a combination of cats and television. The area I grew up in has a strong accent but I managed to have a generic tv accent due to just watching way too much.
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Careful. I was Nulln Void for ever on there, til someone (someone I know in person!) reported me to FB for using a fake name.So I got locked out until I came up with … another fake name. For reasons much more eloquently described upthread, I have no interest in using my actual, pretty unique name. Additionally, I have a fairly broad online presence in my professional capacity, and I’m definitely not interested in sharing my actual social and political, often snarky, opinions with the wild range of people i deal with (and love, for the most part) professionally.
All that AND please god I do NOT want people from high school or my twenties looking me up and deciding we should be besties now. shudder
I’m certain the data miners can easily figure out who I am, but with a burner email attached and incorrect personal details, there would be some work involved,. And I’m pretty sure I’m not worth that.
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You can tell there’s a difference between generations like Millennials (and Gen X as well) and Gen Z. Like everyone younger than me by at least a decade has multiple accounts on Twitter alone and I prefer just having one (I have a single backup if lose access to my main account). I think it’s more about organizing one’s information. Like would you want grandma to see your porn shares on Twitter? Probably not. But you don’t mind showing her videos of your pet doing something funny or commenting about how Christmas Dinner was great. It’s all about context and in each situation the context sets the tone of the kind of conversation you’ll have online/offline. Social media companies don’t grasp this concept very well and they assume a single point of entry for all engagement, especially when it comes to advertising which their system is built on the single identity model it seems. It’s why I say if you’re willing to take the time it’s best to make multiple identities to organize your information (not so much for privacy) when it matters. At minimum everyone should have a profession identity online that covers the basics of their profession (current or former) and one that handles personal matters dealing with family. The rest is really up to your imagination on how better to organize it all.
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Right back atcha, TornPaperNapkin!
I divorced my spouse in the early oughts because they fell into the intertubes, and fought off all attempts at rescue. The online persona overtook the offline persona, and I refused to be screamed at by a Troll high on troll food. This X later was…well, not EXACTLY stalking me, but was stepping over some boundaries by continuing to write about me - using my full legal name - in their little Troll blog. A subtle threat of libel shut the Troll up, at least in print.
By watching someone turn into an evil goblin, and trying to strut around in real life as if armored in ‘likes’ and accolades from other Trolls, makes me hesitant every time I leave a comment online. I stop and ask myself, “Can this be traced back to me? Am I a Troll?.” Needless to say, I never drank the Facebook cool-aid.
Just because I’ve been reading BoingBoing since the early days doesn’t mean this website is everything to me. In fact, my old user name ‘disappeared’ when BB changed their login procedure. I have interests and real life activities that would give most of the Happy Mutants a rash. Dirt! Manual labor! This is not where I come for advice on the germination of native plants, or whether I need rosin paper between my tongue-and-groove subfloor and a layer of oak flooring. Sometimes, I need to chat with lefty-liberals with warped senses of humor, and other times I need to chat to the kind of people you guys flame. I guess that makes me one of the ‘young people’…
Facebook knows you’re a dog.
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I agree. It’s why I always just keep a professional identity for everything that isn’t my online interests. The rest goes into my “real” online identity. But my online/real identity is basically singular compared to other folks that I’ve seen split it up a bit more (ex. I have mutual follows on Twitter where they have a private account for their closer friends (aka not me)) which I can understand the need, yet I’m pretty happy with how I’ve partitioned my life so far online.
Annoy young people with this one simple trick!
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I’ve often thought it would be interesting to have a group of people, say a houseful of roommates, posting as one user here. I’ve wondered if we would be able to tell. Maybe some are right now!
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Well trollies are a whole other issue. In my personal experience some trollies have inherent personality flaws that just make them go off the deep end. I’ve seen it for years on Second Life and it’s gotten worse as more people have come online. I don’t know if this is a new trend or just an old one that got more obvious with time. It’s one of those things that I don’t know if a good therapy session or a dressing down by the local pastor would fix. Either way, I try to keep my distance from such folks these days (haven’t logged into Second Life in six months).
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YES! YES! Me too! Except for me, it’s not so much paranoia (although there’s definitely some 2-ply tinfoil helmet going on), as Short Attention Span: “This idiot needs to be flamed…oh, look! A rat taking a shower!” I also tend to view all social media contacts the same way as unidentified phone calls: “Who’s calling? What’s it to you?”
The whole constant-contact, GPS-tracking, live tweeting reminds of that episode of Star Trek:TNG where Riker brings back the brain toy that sucks the entire crew in so that the bad aliens can steal the ship:
For the X, it was a case of a genetic flaw suddenly blossoming into a full-blown Troll personality due to contact with whatever form of low-level radiation that leaks out of chatboards.
Excuse me while I put on my tinfoil helmet…
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Native people around here have names like Alice Strikes With A Gun and Bob Yellow Old Woman. They have had problems with FB names policy.
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