Tag Archives: identity

Jun 11 2012

What’s In A Name?

So I am trying to force myself to buckle down and get busy writing my new Empire Avenue Missions Guide and getting absolutely nowhere with it.  Some days it seems as though I wake up tired and drained and things inevitably go downhill from there.

Today I find myself thinking about online identity.  Reading a piece in a professional blog that includes the rather standard advice about being careful what you post in your social profiles because employers and prospective employers will read them and make judgement about you based upon them,   I found myself thinking that my friends in human resources would probably quite agree with my idea that you should have separate profiles,  which are not in fact associated with your wallet name,  for doing the kinds of things you don’t want your boss or your mother to hear about.

It appears to me that inflation has hit Empire Avenue missions big time.   So many of the longest established players who have accumulated great wealth put forth missions paying 10,000 eaves and can offer a huge number of them.    It’s almost to the point I don’t see much point even putting up missions that offer only 2,500 eaves.   So I find myself wondering if rather that a guide to using missions to drive social traffic and activity,  what I need to do is write a lesson on creating and accumulating wealth so as to be able to drive social activity using missions.      I just don’t feel ready to write the next volume and feel certain I am going to miss the July 1st release date I had been working towards.   Ah well.   I will write no book before its time.

Apr 16 2011

How many people can you really be?

Some days,  blog posts seem to just pop up in my mind,  flow quickly through my fingers and keyboard and onto the screen and twenty minutes later,  I am doing something else.   Other days,  like yesterday I type a title,  spend hours searching for an image,  make multiple false starts and never do get around to finishing.

I have been thinking a lot lately about identity and being online.   When I first when online on Compuserve, our “handles” were longer than phone numbers (mine was the very catchy, memorable 74220,741) although most of us had our settings to display our real names next to them online.   I remember being quite surprised when a friend mentioned to me that she was using a pseudonym on Compuserve.   Were people really whom they presented themselves at online?    On local “bulletin board systems” most people only used handles– though honestly I never spent much time on BBS’s.    In the early days of Internet discussion boards and forums (post Usenet, pre-Facebook) the use of handles was pretty standard,  although it varied a great deal as to whether the handles used were readily associated with the user’s real names.  

I have friends I’ve know and talked to for years  (looking at Cardiogirl) whose real names I don’t know.  I also have friends whom I’ve known by both their name on one site and their handle on another site– and never realized that both were the same person.  (glancing at Lord Zod)   Facebook seems to have a policy of requiring only real names–  I’ve heard stories of people who have been locked out of FB for using a handle.  Although I have a friend who does.    And it was on FB that I was chatting with some folks about all of this name/handle, online-identity stuff,  and was a bit surprised at how vehement most of these folks are about only using their real names online.  Honestly,  it seems to me that life is sufficiently complex that there can be perfectly legitimate reasons that some parts of one’s life are better conducted under a different handle.

Where do you fall on this?   Do you use your real name Everywhere?  or nowhere?   Do you use different handles for different parts of your online life?