Why I will not use my real name online

[snailrind]

My lovely sister,

You asked me why I won't use my real name online, and so this blog entry is dedicated to you.

I know my insistence on nicknames must seem petty and strange. I'm putting my reasons here because I have many teenage friends, on the brink of their future careers, who use their real names online; they could all do with reading this. So

Comments

[uk_sef]

Speaking of all things being Greek (to whomever), would you be any good at knowing Greek folksongs and/or nursery rhymes?

How goes it?

[anonymous]

Yo, Snailrind - Auntie Social here - how are you doing? Soz for not emailing but I keep being ill... do you happen to know of a saying in Welsh that actors might say to each other? An equivalent of the English and American 'break a leg'? My uncle wants to write to John Cale in Welsh again....thanks for this article, am thinking I might change my name on Facebook if it's not too late.... though I don't blog or give much info and thankfully people I have purposefully lost touch with haven't tried to contact me again...how is Bunty?

Re: How goes it?

[anonymous]

That is, if Bunty is whom I think they are....

[anonymous]

I'm not sure the Irish MP one is not the best example: (a) in general, by opting-in to be an elected representative who has considerable powers over the life of fellow citizens, you could argue they also opt-in for transparency. should people elected on the basis on a fake constructed character who is not who they are? (b) in this particular incident, I don't see why she'd want to keep as people voting for her idiots who are upset by this innocent photo. she probably gained quite a few supporters as well with it.

also the more common one's name, the less there is a problem: the google match set will be a hard to disentangle, someone searching doesn't get everything about 1 life, but everything about 500 unrelated lives mixed up in one dataset. try looking up a Debbie Smith on facebook let alone google.

re job interview etc: it's a two-edged sword, you can go to a job interview with a thick dossier about your interviewer and blackmail them into employing you (or else! ;-))

signed:
the anon pig. :-)

[snailrind]

Haha, I like the interviewer dossier idea!

My sister and I have unique names, so in our case, it might be more worthwhile to hang onto pseudonyms. However, my sister has kept her real name online and it doesn't seem to be preventing her from doing anything. If anything, it seems to be helping. She is developing a name for herself as a model.

earnest

[anonymous]

ernest is not a bad place to be :) In fact Earnest is a pretty cool moniker - I think it should be your next for the next alias blog ;-)

Eirmid

Anonymity

[ext_346499]

If I discovered your real name/identity so quickly, someone else is bound to, as I'm no genius! Anyway congrats on keeping yourself incognito for so long!!

Re: Anonymity

[snailrind]

True, true...

I've been getting more relaxed about it as time goes on, too.