Characters on the Interweb

There are some people, like my housemate, who have a name that they use consistently across the internet as a username. It makes it easy to stalk people like this online, because all you have to do is find them once, and you've found them everywhere. Because of this, they have a consistent identity on the internet.

Myself, I never developed a nickname that I felt worked as an online personality. Well, there's my high school nickname, "Ser", but it's often too short to use, and it's pretty much my name, anyways. I feel sort of left out from the in-crowd of the internet, because I don't have a handle, a codename that allows me exclusive access into the "I use the internet so much I have an identity on here" club. Even though, really, I do use the internet that much.

Not having a cohesive online identity sometimes makes me feel as though I don't really contribute much to the web, which is interesting because the whole point of Web 2.0 is that everyone can contribute equally. It's communism for communication. However, not having a name with which to brand myself means that I am just a faceless entity, floating around and leaving comments on websites without anything to tie me down to. It basically makes me anonymous.

Then again, not having an internet identity also means that I don't have to be careful about what I do online. For example, I recently started a cooking blog to try and turn my use of cooking as a method of procrastination into something that is productive. For this blog I created a new email address, and thus a new online identity, in a way. Why did I do this? Because I'm not sure how well this blog is going to go, and there's no point associating myself to it if it turns out to be something I don't enjoy doing. Also, the people who I ravage skilfully in online games won't be able to track me down and flame my recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

It all means that I'm a little bit schizophrenic in my online personality. I change depending on what site I log onto, what name I've decided to use for what circumstance. While the anonymity is nice, I do feel like I'm missing out on being a contributing part of the internet.