Friday's Unscientific Poll

[nanila]

Poll #15822 Pseudonymity

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47

View Respondents

I am comfortable with connecting my "in-person" physical identity and my online identities.

View Answers

Never or hardly ever. I prefer to keep them separate
5 (10.9%)

Conditionally by topic, e.g. only with respect to things I've posted about publicly on my journal
11 (23.9%)

Conditionally by sphere of interaction, e.g. only in person or only online
11 (23.9%)

Conditionally by individual, e.g. only with those I know well
24 (52.2%)

Conditionally by venue, e.g. only my Twitter identity but not my Tumblr
22 (47.8%)

Unconditionally
4 (8.7%)

Here is another condition I apply to connecting my online and in-person presences:

View Answers

(Inspired by a LonCon3 panel writeup from kaberett. I'm still thinking this topic through and the poll hasn't come out exactly as I wanted to phrase it but it's a start.)

Comments

[recessional]

My answer gets conditional because I don't reeeeally divide my life into online/in-person.

The division in my life is:

- "association by choice/at pleasure" (aka full personality, if they don't like it they can bugger off)
- "association by necessity" (aka personality performance altered in greater or lesser ways to smooth relationship)

For instance, the latter covers both my grandparents and my employers. This is not because my grandparents are bad people, but they're my grandparents: I love them dearly, but our relationship is part of a complicated tangle of obligations and duties and rights that is family-as-we-understand-it, which means I watch what I say and pick my battles over, say, my aunt's casual use of the "g*pped". In these relationships, give and take is important, so I edit myself to make it a lot easier, keeping in mind that it would take a HUGE EGREGIOUS BIG DEAL for "take a hike" to cut in.

Same with my employers: who I am around them is performed within a context where in order to keep giving me money to look after their children and basically have the run of their house because of it, they have to not be uncomfortable around me, which means I alter what I say for greatest social harmony. Etc.

The flipside is associations-by-choice, where I am much more comfortable making hard lines like "if you cannot eliminate your use of these words in my space, get out of my space and stay out." Or "if you can't deal with me as the full out random ASD weirdo that I am, please feel free to go be friends with someone else." There are no other ties holding me to people, like blood-family or financial or teaching relationships or whatever.

For me, a lot of my solely in-person relationships are the former, and mostly my crossover or solely online relationships are the latter and I tend not to cross the streams not because I'm worried or being secretive, but for the same reason that I guess a more normal person (presumably) would not necessarily want her LinkedIn contacts finding the facebook she uses to arrange which club she's going to meet all her friends at. I employ mild measures to keep the two separate because that makes not crossing those two streams easier.

But on the other hand I'm sort of obsessively careful about having strategies in place for handling the conversations if they do cross, because I'm not willing to be paranoid about it, you know?

[crystalpyramid]

You do a good job of describing the divide between the set of people I'm Facebook friends with (includes lots of associations by necessity) and the set of people I'm blog friends with (associations by choice even if I don't know them in real life). Consequently I'm a lot more free giving out real life info to blog friends than giving blog info to FB friends. And while many of my continued associations with former students are at this point associations by choice, they should not under any circumstances end up on my blog.

[recessional]

Yeah the categories do blur a little bit - there's a husband of a friend who is quite "association by necessity" technically but whom I act like the other kind more or less because he met me in that context, and the students one is a good example of the other. It's just that the medium is a context of the difference not a cause, you know?

[oursin]

Yes, that. I have all sorts of people from different parts of my life, from close family to fairly casual academic acquaintances, as FB friends, which makes it all rather beige. Wouldn't necessarily want them all reading at DW/LJ. Whereas I am a lot less bothered about my DWcircle knowing Who I Am.

[niqaeli]

This is a pretty great articulation. Because I don't really make the distinction of offline/online, either -- it's much more about context in which we encountered each other and in what way we continued to interact that determines what aspects of my personality/identity you get.

[quoththeravyn]

I have written online about my gender identity issues, about which I'm not really out in real life. Folks who know me both online and in real life are fine, but I'd rather not have real-life folks stumbling on my online journals (not just here) and connecting me to them.

I suppose one day I should dare to be me, everywhere. But as the daily tweet from Terry Pratchett said today, "Bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight."

[ironed_orchid]

I'm am much happier with online friends from sites such as this to know my other identities than I am with some people I know in person discovering my online identities. I tried to reflect that in my answers, but it wasn't quite the same.

One reason is that my mum google stalks me, so I try to make my wallet name show only stuff I am comfortable with her finding.

[azurelunatic]

These days I have only two primary identities, Azz and my wallet name.

I am Azz in most spaces online.
I do have a perfunctory online presence under my wallet name, because it's weird to not, these days.

I keep my wallet name for work and tax purposes. I will occasionally tell trusted friends from either side of my life the other name. (Occasionally I share my wallet name with people who I think might be a good match for my workplace, even if we're not that close.)

[pbristow]

As you can probably tell from my username here, most things I'm happy to just say "yeah, this is me, deal with it"... But I have a couple of aliases I use for particular places online. Basically the closer stuff gets to being deeply personal and/or controversial, the more careful I am about leaving breadcrumb trails back to the rest of my life.... *Especially* if other people's privacy/right to a "quiet life" might be affected. OTOH, there are some things (e.g. mental health and other "invisible illnesses") where I've decided to be completely visible and identifiable, 'cos real people need to know there are other "real people" who have these things.

Even if you don't leave obvious trails, of course, any sufficiently determined person can put two and two together these days (see "data-mining"), so sometimes it's more important to make sure they don't get three or five, than to futilely attempt to prevent them getting any answer at all.

[chickenfeet]

If I were to reveal what I do and don't associate with my "real identity" it would reveal things I don't choose to associate with my "real identity".

[niqaeli]

So my answer is sort of complicated, because... it's conditional, these days? But I originally made no distinction or separation whatsoever; I've never been ashamed of fandom or fannishness. I had a domain and webspace that used (a form of) my legal name where I hosted all my fannish stuff.

The thing is, my legal name's relatively uncommon, and this identity is unique (seriously, if you ever see anyone using this name and you think it's not me, let me know, because i have a good case for impersonation -- every other instance of this name IS me). And I went into a profession where fannishness is hardly normalised.

So I've since separated the two -- I didn't stuff my fannishness in the closet particularly, but I've written a few things I don't actually care to explain to potential employers (there's a difference between defending fannishness and defending your own fannishness) -- or worse still, never have the opportunity to, because they googled me and found it and decided, nah, we're not going to interview the weird woman.

But I've never really tried very hard to keep things separated even since I pulled the two apart (I still don't actually know how that was possible; the universe looks out for fools and dumb teenagers, I guess). There's far too many people who know the links to ever really manage that; really, I just want to keep this identity out of the search results if you google my legal name. I'll make the connection pretty readily for people in either direction, as seems appropriate. But I am much more likely to connect people who know me through this identity to my legal name, than I am to connect people I know elsewhere to this identity and to be honest it's not just the search results worry. This is how/where I express a lot of stuff that I modulate in a lot of offline circumstances for various reasons -- be it because it's stuff I'm working through or just stuff that's not appropriate to the venue/context. Like, it took a long time before I was willing to make the connection for my co-worker I had identified in about five seconds as fannish and had, in fact, found her online presence very quickly; I wanted to be comfortable with her having access to that much knowledge about me.

OTOH, I am very likely to connect people who may also know my legal name to this identity if I met them at, say, a con. In fact I typically use this name as my badge name at cons; I've had enough crossover between worlds for long enough -- and I've been going by this name for 12 years -- that I respond to both niq and my legal name quite readily.

(Of course, I do have a minimal presence online under my legal name. Facebook, to keep in touch with certain folks, and a couple of journals here on DW that don't really see much use. It's not really my online life at all.)

Anyway, identity: it's complicated!

[liseuse]

I am conditionally willing to actively share the link between my identities dependent on how much I have in common with/like/am associating in a professional way with someone else.

Lazily, I am lazy and probably don't separate out as much as I could, but am also lucky in that my legal name is also that of several geological things, a gazillion housing developments in bits of the US, and a vineyard in South Africa (I really want to go). So, people who follow me on twitter could probably work out very easily who I am if they got intrigued by something cryptic I've tweeted, but I don't actively encourage it in my tweeting. I don't, however, ask other people not to tweet about these things.

[holyschist]

My fannish identity is something I keep pretty quiet from most of my non-fannish circle, in part because in some ways the me I expose through fandom is more personal than I'm comfortable sharing with people I know but not well (sharing with total strangers on the internet is lower-stakes, because they can be cut off easily and don't matter; people who stick around to become friends already know what they're getting into), in part because I've had jobs where I'm pretty sure things I've written could have been a problem. And yeah, I have a bit of embarrassment about fandom for various reasons.

That said, once I know someone fairly well in fandom, I'm pretty blase about meeting up, being Facebook friends, exchanging mail, etc. It's a lot harder to go the other way, from meeting in RL to 'okay you can read my fic.' And it's not because I'm *embarrassed*, exactly, but just...I feel like it's very revealing and I guess I feel like offline friends are a finite commodity I don't want to drive away. I don't necessarily feel my friends have to ~accept all my interests~ and I don't need my mom to read my porn either. I'm okay with compartmentalizing to some degree, given that my hobbies tend to attract very different sets of personalities.

This identity I'm...medium-separate about? I don't want any obvious, googleable, public connections to my real name, but it's possible to connect the dots and it's not really a secret. At times I've followed a lot of RL friends and vv. GoodReads I guess would be in the same category if I ever got around to using it.

My photography stuff online (Flickr, 500px, Instagram) are all under my real name or very closely connected to it. Likewise my very sporadic nature blogging, which I consider sort of an extension of my professional portfolio rather than social. The only one of those I use in a relatively informal way at this point is Instagram, and I'm still somewhat cautious of what I post.

[shirou]

I assume everything I write will be attributed to me. I may not advertise the connection between my online personas and my real name, but I operate under the assumption that anybody with a serious interest would be able to figure it out.