I’m at ThatCampSoCal this week, and over dinner last night I found myself in an interesting discussion with Alexis Lothian (@alothian) and Amanda French (@amandafrench) about social networking, pseudonymity, and creativity.
I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while and not sure how to do it, but I’ll try and just do it in point form.
1. Some internet communities support pseudonymity, some don’t. Facebook is the classic example of a site that requires you to use your legal name and only have one account strongly linked to your own identity. On the opposite side are sites like Twitter and LiveJournal (and its clones and forks) which implicitly or explicitly encourage people to sign up with pseudonyms and/or hold multiple accounts.
2. Many recent attempts at social networking privacy seem to be focused around single accounts and multiple groups/filters for posting and reading. For instance, Facebook and Diaspora both let you create groups of friends, post items for just that group to see, or filter your reading using those groups. The idea is that you create a group for family, one for friends, one for work colleagues, and so on, the interact with each of those groups under the banner of your single identity.
3. However, pseudonymity is well established as an alternative way of doing privacy. Many people have two Twitter accounts, one for work and one for play, or multiple accounts for multiple (real or fictional) personas. Managing privacy with multiple accounts becomes an exercise in logging in and out and acting “as” a persona, rather than choosing which group or filter to use while logged in to the one identity account.
4. Pseudonymous and multiple accounts encourage creativity. I’ve noticed that there’s a correlation between pseudonymous/multiple accounts and sites/communities that have the most fun, creative, and weird stuff going on. Or, as I put it last night: Feminist Hulk would never exist on Facebook — it’s against Facebook’s Terms of Service. To me, the best stuff about the Internet (from old-school Usenet humour to remix video) is produced by people not operating under their legal names. It’s no surprise to me that sites like Archive Of Our Own explicitly support pseudonyms, and that the folks at Dreamwidth, which aims to be a community for creative people, are working on tools to make it easier to manage multiple accounts/personas.
One of the things I dislike about Facebook and similar sites is the expectation that everyone has one true self, and that they always relate to other people in that persona. To me, that feels both false and unpleasant. I don’t want to be like that — I want to be able to wear different hats (or masks) at different times, and present myself completely differently depending on context: professional, artistic, intimate, whatever.
So, I guess this is request for people to think about the idea of pseudonymity and its effect on personal expression and creativity online, and think about what sort of Internet you want to be using.
(Related: people often claim that lack of real names leads to incivility online. I wrote a criticism of that last year, which you should probably read if you feel the urge to make that argument.)