False Identities

Though I've tried to keep them separate, my "me" blog and my "WoW" blog are on the same email account, and by now at least one person (Hi Silver!) has figured out my terrible secret! Over the years I've had a great deal of online journals (that's what this amounts to, really) and have changed names many times. I've stuck with Threnody/Threnodee the longest, but before that I had at least 3 that I can remember, and I put those names on EVERYthing I did that was remotely related to the Internet, and very few people who knew those names ever knew my real one. That brings me to the subject of my post: Internet Identity.

From a purely academic perspective, this phenomenon I call "multiple screen name disorder," dates back to the time of the very first message boards, chat rooms, and instant messengers. For the first time ever, people had almost total anonymity in conversations. With a physical piece of mail, your address and name were attached (they could be falsified, but it was less likely) so there wasn't as much a sense of anonymity as with email and newsgroups and such. Up until the mid 90s, the 'net as we know it did not exist, and there was a relatively small group of people using it. When chatrooms, screennames, and Instant Messaging hit the blogotubes, there came a shift.

Instead of a few people using aliases, you had more or less everyone using aliases. The real names were all taken by early adopters, and even if they weren't, the practice has always been discouraged. I think my family got AOL back in 1996, and my very first screen name was Psy3. I wanted to keep it short, and the names I wanted were already taken (I went through pretty much all the female X-men and had to go for shortened Psylocke...sigh). With brand new screen name in hand, I plopped myself in comic book, videogame, and anime chat rooms on AOL and developed myself a reputation.

I found myself lying about my age to gain credibility for my opinions on various comic-related topics. Would Rogue and Gambit ever really be together? Would Joe Madureira ever properly proportion a female character? Would Rob Liefeld ever correctly proportion anything?

Eventually, I dropped the Psy3 screen name when we switched off of the AOL service, and found myself with yet another blank slate identity to mold, with an entire web to explore instead of just chatrooms. Did I lie about my age this time to gain credibility? Nope! Instead, I wrote in adorablespeak (dropping "kawaii" and "ne" in as many sentences as possible) and really played up the adorable anime geek that I sort of was, but not really. I learned to make websites, and went full tilt into anime mode, even moreso than I am now.

The next time my identity changed, it was because I had my very first e-stalker, and I needed to lose him.That worked out pretty well for a long time, but I think he's trying to find me again, and that's scary. But anyway, now I'm juggling two internet personas at once, and I know I'm not the only one who does it. Anyone with multiple blogs about more than one subject can be said to have multiple screen name disorder. I'm not only TheGirlNerd, but I'm also known by my WoW character names. It spills over into real life, too. I visited my WoW guild in Canada last September, and most of them had a hard time calling me by my real name. They call me Thren, because to them that is my identity.

My academic ponderance, based in personal experience, is how deeply does having multiple screen name disorder affect the person behind the name? Do we have to pretend to be our online personality so much that it becomes our real personality? Look at people like the creators of Penny Arcade. Have they been Gabe and Tycho for so long that they really have BECOME Gabe and Tycho? Are their real identities lost to the bits of time? I want to know what people think about this. It's been over ten years since this whole blogotubes thing got started, so I'm sure there are papers written about this very subject, but I'm an incredibly curious little meatbag. Let's have a discussion.

Edit: DSCarmon made an excellent point. I'm mostly talking about people who participate in online communities. These are just floaty questions going through my teeny brain. It would require a dedicated study to actually account for all the variables factoring into the answers to my questions.