ms yarn commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
Partly, no doubt, due to isolation out here from a supportive, intelligent community of people with common interests, I have become fairly close with a small online community. This never, NEVER would have happened ten years ago, I agree. I have exchanged real mail, packages, and email with many of them, as we grow from our handles to know the people behind them.I hear more about their daily lives than I do my real-life friends sometimes, and I find myself concerned for their welfare as if we lived next door. Friend once told me something that he heard somewhere, "Never talk to people on trains, but when you are twenty-one, start talking to people on trains. You can meet some really interesting people that way." I guess maturity protects us a little from potential youthful pitfalls, as also knowing that anonymity isn't as anonymous as we think it is.
Edward Vielmetti commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
Of late I've noticed people with easy transitions between Real Names and nicknames, and what would have been a "handle" in the old world is not just one more nickname that you give someone whose real name you also know.
As it turns out, if your interests are broad enough sometimes you can pull off having more than one online nickname, and some people will know you as one thing and some as another even if you're not explicitly hiding your identity.
(I know you only as thedaniel, bkerr's friend, but I see bkerr frequently enough to know that if I needed a real name it would be easy to find out.)
nicknames can be really useful in order to make yourself more findable on the net. People have a lot easier time remembering and typing 'superpatron' than they do 'vielmetti' when they want to look up my library interests, and so the nickname adds to my visibility and doesn't detract from it.
Anonymous commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
interesting, the new melding of the virtual and tangible worlds. i, too, have observed the shift from relying on a sort of "facade" (read, handles and the use of fake names and identities to hide the real person behind the text) to a sort of nouveau-real...the kind of reality that still facilitates the artifice that often plagues humanity and yet also embraces a new sort of community where brutal honesty and candid discussions can be accepted without the possible shame and/or degradation of a face-to-face spilling of personal issues.cheers.