Forbidden Donut

It's pretty much wubs exclusive. Why? For the lulz, and because I suspect most people aren't comfortable with throwing their real name out to new people with reckless abandon. And oftentimes it's because people adopt a separate personality on the internet. Making a new name throws up a cover, a partition between two distinct personalities. Also upon rereading what I just wrote, I sound like a gigantic faggot. Posting anyway.

You don't think that we have similar motives when creating an internet name than people did (do?) when using CB radios? CB radios might not be the best example, but I think it shows that the desire to create a new, more anonymous image was there before the internets were a sparkle in Al Gore's beautiful man-eyes.


I'm not going to touch the "how safe is posting your name on the internet" debate, at least not yet. But I will say that I think that people create new names for more than just security. The names are actually part of an entirely different facade separate from what people see in real life.


I agree completely. I suppose that's at the heart of my question. Why do we create that separate personality? Was it always there? When we fill out an online form, we don't even think of using our real name as our internet name.. but why the distinction between your real life persona and your online behavior?

Anonymity, humor, politicking, etc.

The internet provides people with a rare opportunity to disappear and reappear as a brand new person with a clean slate. As ANunes I am more or less me. As Vajayjayface or Dildozer I may not be so inclined to reflect my own opinions. It sounds pretty childish, but trolling is pretty damned fun and trolling REQUIRES the use of alternate personalities.

Wanna learn about internet culture? Lurk on a few choice forums. I like fark, somethingawful and ytmnd.com Fark is a GREAT place to sit back and enjoy the show. Grab a bucket of popcorn and a six pack and hunker down one night to read every thread in the politics section. I like something awful because of it's particular culture. People get banned every 45 seconds or so and it's still a HUGE community of people. And ytmnd is a meme-factory of epic proportions.

yeah anonymity and to to be able to uniquely identify each other, ironically, especially in larger groups. in smaller circles where you actually know each other irl real names work fine, but in larger forums there's bound to be more than one matt, dave, or john. if one of their names was CUNT_BURGLAR, it would be "great, it's this asshole again" instead of clicking around trying to figure out which john it was.

also i disagree that you need an alias to troll, but it does make it better, just like jenna jameson didn't have to call herself jenna jamesinmyass but it would've been funnier.

For me, it's simple. If I used "Courtney" or any variation of that as my handle, every random person on every forum and server I frequented would try to hump my leg immediately. A lot of people, especially gamers, get raging wood when they think a chick is using the Internet near them.

However, I do use and have used Governor pretty exclusively for all of my years on the 'net. I don't really think it is a different persona, but it is definitely how a lot of my friends know and address me (well, as "gov" at least).

The way I see it: You are given a name at birth and grow to be that person. When you enter the internet, you create a new "person" that you get to name. It's like a second birth in ways. Outside the internet, you alter yourself to fit society and your social circles. On the internet, you enter a different society and different social circles, and you can be more or less true to who you are beneath it all. ...Or maybe it's just me.

?!?!!!! This IS my real name.

I randomly entered each character of Gmnotutoo in while creating a name for a custom wrestler for the game N64's Wrestle Mania 2000. It stuck with me.

Yeah. I use a totally different name than I do irl. If someone called me Bill irl they'd have some explainin' to do.

True. But why, when offered anonymity, do we immediately take it? Why do we feel the need for a clean slate? We spend our entire lives working on our image (how we see ourselves and how others see us). With that much work invested in "who you are", why do we start from scratch when we are offered a text box that asks you for a username? I guess it's not the name that matters so much, but the image. The name just happens to be the first step in creating that image. I know that the internet allows you to be whoever you want to be with no risk of personal attack (flame wars don't count), but why is our internet image any different than our real life image? We can't all be that dissatisfied with ourselves.


How strangely philosophical. I like it. And I don't think it's just you. However, what (other than "society") is stopping you/us from being more true to ourselves in real life? True, the internet has a different set of social rules, but so what? Why do our true tendencies only come out through anonymity?


Hmm. That's a completely different question that I'll probably ask next time I have time to kill at work. I'm afraid I'm turning into a, what do you call it? Forum troll?


Maybe not a different persona, but a subset persona? Maybe Court possesses all of the characteristics that Governor does, but Governor is a more (I can't think of the word I'm looking for) focused version? As in, Governor gives you a way to focus on certain aspects of your personality while leaving out the stuff that's not useful to you on the internet. Or maybe I'm completely wrong and you really do just use Governor as a label. But I think that a lot of people see their online persona as different than their RL persona.


Well, Bill, you're an exception to the rule. You're an exception to a lot of rules.

zero equals user id (root)


and because someone already registered n-word charles

People who don't include their real name in their internet name because they are ugly.

Attractive people (like myself) include their real name in their ub3r cool internetz name, because they are attractive.

Jason is the only exception to this rulez.

Perhaps. This isn't the best place to try to analyze that, though. A lot of us have merged our "internet" lives into our "real" lives fairly extensively. Many of us from around the country have met in person on a number of occasions. We've met friends online (not just "online" friends, but people who we have later gone to school with, worked with, hung out with regularly, etc). So it isn't too far of a stretch to assume many of us have pretty successfully completely merged our offline persona with our online persona without having to subset or anything along those lines.

I'm not saying it is unreasonable to assume people (ourselves or others) develop internet persona's that coincide with internet nomenclature; quite to the contrary. I just think this particular group of people will have a significant different analysis of their persona's than most others on the 'net.

True enough. This community is more tightly knitted than others. But members of this community can still talk about their experiences in other communities and interactions with users all over the internets. In fact, maybe their time spent in this more personal environment can give them a deeper insight into why we behave the way we do when we are anonymous.

Does it matter? Is the psychology/sociology of the internet a subject even worth talking about? Or is it going to be the next big area of study as the line between our online lives and our offline lives blur?

i like cartoons.

at the time I came up with this username/persona. I was about 14/15 and internet anonyminity was a pretty big priority. Now I could really care less.
www.brandoncady.com what?

Qft.

Foowanko is the way my baby cousins used to say my name. Franco ---> Fwanko ---> Foowanko

I suck at coming up with names and my name annoys me to say out loud a lot. I tend to use a lot of different handles just to throw off the coppers.

My name was azn.mike cuz I'm asian with a name with Mike

Then I got emo and listened to Linkin Park and once reanimation album came out I stole their ideaz.


Forgotten.azn.mike ----> frgt10azn----->frgt.tn.azn

"Riley Freeman aka Young Reezy aka H.R. Moneystacks aka..."

I came up with kiwi because kiwis are awesome an fruit and I met someone with the nickname kiwi and I thought that was the coolest thing ever for some reason. So I followed the Ewing family tradiation and stole someone's nickname and used it for my own. ZinG... Which later turned into k mostly because I'm lazy and if I didn't talk on the mic I was assumed a woman ?