I YAM WHAT I YAM
The Validity Of Online Identity 

Welcome everyone to Information Underground.  Here today are Deepgeek 
(PAUSE), and Klaatu (PAUSE), and I, lostnbronx.

The names we've just given to you are not the ones we were born with, 
strangely enough.  They aren't the one's we are even addressed by most of 
the time, yet they are the ones we are best known by, the ones which the 
most people in this world know us as.  With the exception of family and 
a couple of friends and acquaintances here and there, no one who knows 
the name of lostnbronx can identify it with my face.  It's that OTHER 
name they know.  Odd then, that so very, very few people who know my 
"day name", as it were, can identify with me with it either.  In fact, 
just about the only ones who CAN are the same people in real life who 
already know me as lostnbronx.

So, I have a legal name that few recognize, and an online name that, 
well, maybe only a few MORE recognize.  Okay, I'm a bad example.  The 
fact is, if the online world has grown to have a significant presence in 
your life, then you likely are known by a particular identity, or series 
of identities.  Some people choose their day names, some choose from a 
bunch of aliases, depending upon the exact venue or attraction or 
service they are participating in.  And some of us choose just one 
alias, and more-or-less stick with it.  I've been lostnbronx since I 
started online, back in the mid-nineties.  I'm the one and only.  You do 
an online search for lostnbronx -- that's (SPELL IT), and you're 
searching for me.  There isn't a crapload of results, mostly because I'm 
a poor networker, but there are some, and if you look a few pages in, 
you'll likely learn my day name.  Ooo...can you hold your water, you 
private eye you?!

It's not such a big deal to me, obviously.  For the sake of SOME 
privacy, I keep the two distinct, but otherwise, I am he and he is me, 
I'll meet you at the top of the digital tree!  And, in fact, in order to 
gain some marginal spillover of recognition between the two of me, even 
this small distinction may evaporate, depending upon what projects I 
choose to pursue in the future.  In other words, if I decide I want real 
life people to identify my day name with my online identity, due to some 
accomplishment or other there, or vicey-versey, then I may be less 
obfuscating about it, not that I am especially such, anyway.

And, really THAT'S what I'm talking about when I refer to online 
identities: because so many of us are known by our account names, in 
many cases -- I'd even guess in MOST cases -- we're known by so many 
MORE people online by it than we are in real life by our day names, that 
these somewhat anonymous personas we've created are valid, or should be 
CONSIDERED to be valid identities.  In other words, WHO you say you are 
matters.  The name you've gone by online, which may or may not be 
closely associated with your real world identity, is at least as valid 
as it.  The reputation, such as it is, that I've built up as lostnbronx 
is a real one.  It would hurt me greatly to lose it, or to have it 
sullied by some digital scandal, or online pissing contest.  Yet, if I 
chose to, I could stop all activity in lostnbronx's name, and come up 
with something or somethingS new, and start over from scratch.  A fresh 
beginning.  Many's the troll who've gone that route, but there are VALID 
reasons to as well.  But, I say it would hurt me -- because the lion's 
share of my social life is online, and the majority of people, whose 
opinions OF me really matter TO me, are also online.  And they know me 
as lostnbronx.

The topic of online identity is a very complex and wide-ranging one, and 
it deeply involves privacy, security, and criminal issues, among others.  
These are fundamental and unignorable aspects of this topic, but they 
are not what I'm talking about at the moment...not really.  What I mean, 
less than how OTHERS perceive you in the digital world, is how you 
perceive yourself.  I have a day name, but I am less THAT guy than I am 
lostnbronx.  I'll respond to either -- well, depending upon the source, 
I might not respond at all -- but, lostnbronx trumps the other guy every 
time in several aspects of my world.  Recognition, a measure of respect, 
a measure of camaraderie -- these things are HIS province, and they 
matter greatly to me.  Therefore, lostnbronx gets a fair share of my 
attention, and problems that concern his reputation do as well.

In a way, while we've gone forward in this Information Age, forging new 
social and technological environs and mores, we've also had to reach 
back a bit -- back to an era when a person's identity oftentimes, and 
quite literally, had to be taken at face value.  When a new person, 
entering a new social, political, or religious environment could take a 
name and background, more-or-less of their choosing.  When a scandal or 
debt or something may have driven you out of one town, a new name could 
offer a new start in another.  As such, WITHIN the social environment 
this person entered, their reputation became all-important.  Why?  
Because without drivers licenses, government-issued ID cards, credit 
cards, fingerprints, DNA testing, passports, visas -- without these 
things, the only way anybody can verify WHO you really are, is by 
watching and judging your actions.  In this way, the exact name you go 
by is of less importance than the reputation that is associated with it.  
In modern times, identity theft is almost exclusively linked to matters 
of money.  People steal your identity in order to steal YOUR, or someone 
else's, cash or property.  That can hurt -- it can hurt badly -- but 
because of the many and sundry methods in place in the real world to 
concretely identify YOU, the damage to your identity and associated 
reputation is NOT ruinous nor even especially long-lived.  Not so, in 
the series of tubes.

If "arrogant-haxor123" gets known for his or her trollish behavior and 
general boorishness within certain online communities, that would be a 
tough thing to walk away from without a name or community change.  
"haxor's" reputation is all-powerful in the digital worlds wherein he or 
she is known, since no other way of concretely identifying this person 
exists -- at least, for the average user.  Certainly, law enforcement, 
and ISP's, and such, have their little magic spells to learn all the 
details, but for you and me, "haxor" is "haxor" because "haxor" says he 
or she is "haxor".  Because someone calling them self "arrogant-haxor123" 
was microblogging, or was in this same forum, yesterday, behaving very 
much like the "arrogant-haxor123" who is doing so today.  And that is 
all you can know about them, unless you launch some sort of personal 
investigation, which rather defeats the idea of a friendly community, 
no?  Certainly in an environment where passwords or encrypted keys are 
in place, a certain measure of confidence can be enjoyed on the question 
of a person's identity, but, such things are not fool-proof -- nor are 
they meant to be.  If someone else is typing away on "haxor's" keyboard, 
all bets are off, and "haxor's" real world environment is neither known 
to us, nor even learnable.  Not really; again, not without special and 
specialized effort.

So, for the VAST majority of our interactions online, we take people's 
screen names to be real, or real enough for that circumstance.  Some 
people seem to believe that an online reputation should be nothing more 
or less than an extension of their real world ones.  They feel people 
should use their real names, and talk about their real lives, otherwise 
they may not be, well, real.  Also, there is no need for anyone living 
their online lifestyle this way to meld their reputations -- that is, 
they only have ONE reputation to be concerned with.  What they do 
online, and what they do in the real world...it's all the same.  This is 
a convenience, but it immediately brings up questions of privacy and 
security.  If "haxor's" real name is, say, "Agnes Komminsky, of 123 
Example Ave, Sheboygan NJ, USA", and she happens to live across town 
from me, and she's pissed me off one too many times, AND I'm off my 
meds...well, I'm only a bus ride away from making the headlines.  Maybe 
Agnes is such an asshole online because she goes by an assumed name, and 
figures -- probably rightly -- that she can get away with it.  Or maybe 
she's such an asshole, because she's just such an asshole.  Either way, 
she has an online reputation that can bleed over into the real world, 
just like everyone.  If she was "agnes-komminsky123" from the start, 
would she still have been such an asshole to everybody, since there was 
no mask at all?  Well, if she's really an asshole, then yeah, she would 
have been, because she couldn't well help it.  By the same token, every 
single jerk of my acquaintance, every asshole, regardless of gender, age, 
ethnicity, culture, or absolutely anything else -- they've ALL had one 
thing in common: they think every one ELSE is the asshole.  It's never 
them.  So, maybe "haxor" isn't the ass.  Maybe it's me.  But I'm off 
my meds, and mayhem can ensue.  "haxor" has a problem.  We all have a 
problem.

What would I like to see?  Well, rather than melding the two worlds, I 
think we should be building up bigger walls between them.  Tall, strong, 
nigh-unscalable walls -- but with big, strong gates, that we can use to 
come and go, that we can use to step in and out of our different worlds 
and identities at will.  How do we do that, from a technical standpoint?  
I don't know.  Certainly, the way things are right now, it's simply 
impossible: if you come out as your real world self, you can't take it 
back.  All you can do is drop your current online identity, create a new 
one, and make a point of NOT associating your day name with it.  Start 
over from scratch, in other words; and the online reputation you once 
had is consigned to archive.org's Wayback Machine, out of reach, now and 
into the future.  That's a lot of your life, maybe, to just toss away 
like garbage.  It's time and reputation you cannot regain, so it might 
represent a considerable loss to you...maybe even a tragic one.

Okay, my mouth runneth over, so here's the long and short of it: you can 
take a name and claim to be ANYBODY, so it's not the name that matters 
so much, it's you.  How YOU behave.  What YOU do.  The history YOU have 
built up in a community.  THAT is who you are.  That reputation IS 
linked to a name that you go by, but it is precious and irreplaceable in 
its own right.  And I believe we should start acting like it.

.