I have multiple online presences right now, each with different boundaries and purposes. Why? Because I am into several different subcultures (raver, kink, and geek, specifically), and I also have a family with young kids in a suburban neighborhood, and a highish-end programming job. Finally, I like having the freedom to be profane and R-rated online.
So there are at least six of me: Dad, Breadwinner, Nerd, Raver, Perv, and Tourette’s Victim. Each has its own set of acquaintances, with overlap; this means my social life is best described by a multidimensional Venn-hypersphere diagram.
There are very good reasons why most people at the “left end” of that spectrum would rather not know about my activities at the “right end”. I certainly do know some other people who fall in 2/3 or more of those categories as well, but most people I interact with casually don’t. So for those people, all our lives are simpler if they don’t Need To Know and in fact don’t know.
Hence, I have multiple different online identities:
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Facebook: I have only one profile, which has my real name. But I categorize my friends into Freaks (who see everything – mostly ravers & pervs), Family (as you’d expect – friends and family not otherwise freaky), and Workish (career acquaintances). My boss is a Facebook friend in the Workish category, for instance. I set privacy on various items as appropriate, though not with total precision – if someone is following my Wall, I don’t always sanitize perfectly.
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My blog, which is all about hacking stuff, and which I assume is read by my managers. I use my real name and I behave reasonably well and on-topic there.
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An old geriatric-raver email list or two, where I use my own name, but it’s not very discoverable.
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FetLife, another forum altogether for pervs only. That’s where I let that particular freak flag fly.
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This forum, where I use a pseudonym so I can post whatever random gibberish comes to mind on topics exactly like this, and where I like the freedom of knowing I can vent on something without it being trivially linkable back to me in the very next search that happens.
Yes, people can track me down and link all this together if they try, but if someone cares enough to do that, I’m fine going mano-a-mano with them on whatever they come up with. I am more concerned about the people who would rather not know. If those people don’t trip over the other me’s that they don’t want to know about, we’re good.
Also, if you dig in Google under my real name, you will find five years’ worth of postings to Usenet in alt.sex.bondage and soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm, from the days before search engines (indeed, the days when good search engines weren’t even known to be possible!). So in some sense that cat got out of the bag years ago, and someday I will probably have a good This Is Why Not To Use Your Real Name For Some Things On The Internet conversation with my kids about it.
So there you have it: I have multiple presences and even multiple pseudonyms. Internet multi-personality rocks.
