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While internet culture didn’t invent concerns around the question of anonymity and pseudonymity in public interactions, it has created interesting new tensions and opportunities, as well as ramping up the consequences (both good and bad) of the mutability of online identity.
I have been both lucky and privileged in my online interactions with regard to identity. I haven’t made any particular effort to keep my identity information hidden, though I am careful in some cases about what sorts of information I put online at all. But I’ve never had the misfortune of becoming a target for online malice of the sort that can make life hell. (I had brushes with that sort of thing in a couple of Usenet groups where being opinionated and female meant certain people consider me fair game. But Usenet was already going down the tubes at that point, so I lost very little.) And I’ve never been in a position where online malice had any chance of costing me my livelihood, my friends, my freedom, or my life. I say this all as preface to a discussion where I lay out an attitude toward online identity that not everyone would be able to maintain. It is my stand and not a judgment on anyone else’s.
When I was in junior high, my 8th grade English class was doing a couple of plays—not stage performances, just in the classroom. For reasons that I had a hard time articulating, I quietly traded the relatively minor roles I’d been assigned for a job doing props and scenery. As it happened, my English teacher was also my advisor/counsellor and called me in for an explanation of why I had done it. (I’m sure she meant it entirely out of concern, but at the time I felt rather threatened and definitely singled-out by the focused attention.) What I couldn’t explain then, but worked out later was that I was struggling so hard at the time to figure out who I was that I was frightened by the thought of playing a role, and of having the people around me remember that role and not anything about myself. It didn’t help that roles in question were male roles (the class was unbalanced towards girls and when has a school play ever had more female roles?) and villains. I felt I was being asked to be someone else when I never really had a chance to be me.
I have never had a problem with too much visibility. On the contrary, one of my superpowers has always been unintentional invisibility. I can walk through a party unnoticed. I can attend an event and have no one remember later that I was there. (Think I’m exaggerating? After I was guest of honor at OVFF in 2002, I searched in vain afterward for any convention report that mentioned my presence at the con.) And another of my superpowers is being a social chameleon. I can be so good at blending in that people with diametrically opposing viewpoints walk away thinking I agree with them completely. Obscurity and anonymity isn’t something I seek out. On the contrary, I’ve spent much of my life struggling to establish my identity—to get the people around me to see and interact with me and not with a reflective construct.
So for me there’s little attraction in creating online identities that diffuse my selfhood into multiple unrelated faces. There’s little attraction in developing a public mask that no one will connect with my everyday person. If I put the investment into developing a friendship on LiveJournal or facebook or Twitter, I want to get the payoff of that investment when the person intersects me somewhere else.
And when I started publishing fiction, the ability to carry over those investments and that social credit from one venue to another became even more important. Maybe there are people who positively enjoy creating a new identity for different creative endeavors—perhaps as a form of art itself. Not me. Pretty much from the moment I recorded my first filk song, I decided that my official pen name would be my real name – the whole thing – and that I’d use it for everything I created. I’ve always been a bit of a Renaissance woman. There’s no percentage in having a different name for each field I work in because I’d need dozens of them. And the fields merge into each other: medieval research into historic fiction, historic fiction into fantasy, linguistics into onomastics, historic re-creation into academic papers on textile history. I need that carry-over to avoid building every reputation from scratch.
When it comes to my fiction writing, there’s another consideration for me. When I came out as a lesbian back around 1980, I made a conscious decision to live without closets. (We get into the realm of privilege again here.) I never wanted to have to edit or compartmentalize my life in ways that my straight friends and co-workers were not required to. Not all my fiction has queer characters, but the vast majority of it does. When someone in the cafeteria at work asks me what I’m scribbling in my notebook, I want to tell them right out without any evasions. I don’t want to worry that a boss who googles my name will discover something I haven’t already mentioned in passing. I don’t want to give any hint that I might be ashamed or embarrassed about the stories I write.
So I don’t have a pen name. I created my Twitter handle to be as connectable to my identity as possible. When I post comments on blogs, I use my real name, the same as appears on my books and on my facebook account. My original website uses that same name for the domain. Because I want to be visible. I want people to see me. To acknowledge me. To recognize me in all senses of the word. It’s a deliberate choice and it puts me at risk in many ways, but I’d rather risk that than invisibility.
I have been both lucky and privileged in my online interactions with regard to identity. I haven’t made any particular effort to keep my identity information hidden, though I am careful in some cases about what sorts of information I put online at all. But I’ve never had the misfortune of becoming a target for online malice of the sort that can make life hell. (I had brushes with that sort of thing in a couple of Usenet groups where being opinionated and female meant certain people consider me fair game. But Usenet was already going down the tubes at that point, so I lost very little.) And I’ve never been in a position where online malice had any chance of costing me my livelihood, my friends, my freedom, or my life. I say this all as preface to a discussion where I lay out an attitude toward online identity that not everyone would be able to maintain. It is my stand and not a judgment on anyone else’s.
When I was in junior high, my 8th grade English class was doing a couple of plays—not stage performances, just in the classroom. For reasons that I had a hard time articulating, I quietly traded the relatively minor roles I’d been assigned for a job doing props and scenery. As it happened, my English teacher was also my advisor/counsellor and called me in for an explanation of why I had done it. (I’m sure she meant it entirely out of concern, but at the time I felt rather threatened and definitely singled-out by the focused attention.) What I couldn’t explain then, but worked out later was that I was struggling so hard at the time to figure out who I was that I was frightened by the thought of playing a role, and of having the people around me remember that role and not anything about myself. It didn’t help that roles in question were male roles (the class was unbalanced towards girls and when has a school play ever had more female roles?) and villains. I felt I was being asked to be someone else when I never really had a chance to be me.
I have never had a problem with too much visibility. On the contrary, one of my superpowers has always been unintentional invisibility. I can walk through a party unnoticed. I can attend an event and have no one remember later that I was there. (Think I’m exaggerating? After I was guest of honor at OVFF in 2002, I searched in vain afterward for any convention report that mentioned my presence at the con.) And another of my superpowers is being a social chameleon. I can be so good at blending in that people with diametrically opposing viewpoints walk away thinking I agree with them completely. Obscurity and anonymity isn’t something I seek out. On the contrary, I’ve spent much of my life struggling to establish my identity—to get the people around me to see and interact with me and not with a reflective construct.
So for me there’s little attraction in creating online identities that diffuse my selfhood into multiple unrelated faces. There’s little attraction in developing a public mask that no one will connect with my everyday person. If I put the investment into developing a friendship on LiveJournal or facebook or Twitter, I want to get the payoff of that investment when the person intersects me somewhere else.
And when I started publishing fiction, the ability to carry over those investments and that social credit from one venue to another became even more important. Maybe there are people who positively enjoy creating a new identity for different creative endeavors—perhaps as a form of art itself. Not me. Pretty much from the moment I recorded my first filk song, I decided that my official pen name would be my real name – the whole thing – and that I’d use it for everything I created. I’ve always been a bit of a Renaissance woman. There’s no percentage in having a different name for each field I work in because I’d need dozens of them. And the fields merge into each other: medieval research into historic fiction, historic fiction into fantasy, linguistics into onomastics, historic re-creation into academic papers on textile history. I need that carry-over to avoid building every reputation from scratch.
When it comes to my fiction writing, there’s another consideration for me. When I came out as a lesbian back around 1980, I made a conscious decision to live without closets. (We get into the realm of privilege again here.) I never wanted to have to edit or compartmentalize my life in ways that my straight friends and co-workers were not required to. Not all my fiction has queer characters, but the vast majority of it does. When someone in the cafeteria at work asks me what I’m scribbling in my notebook, I want to tell them right out without any evasions. I don’t want to worry that a boss who googles my name will discover something I haven’t already mentioned in passing. I don’t want to give any hint that I might be ashamed or embarrassed about the stories I write.
So I don’t have a pen name. I created my Twitter handle to be as connectable to my identity as possible. When I post comments on blogs, I use my real name, the same as appears on my books and on my facebook account. My original website uses that same name for the domain. Because I want to be visible. I want people to see me. To acknowledge me. To recognize me in all senses of the word. It’s a deliberate choice and it puts me at risk in many ways, but I’d rather risk that than invisibility.
