As many of you know, I'm 28. I grew up during the development of the Internet, and by the time the Internet hit for home users around about 1995, I was 13.

One if the things I was told emphatically not to do back then was to give out any personal details on the Net. No real name, no address, nothing. I didn't quite stick to that - I did use my name sometimes - but I did learn the importance of why it's not a good idea to use offline identities all the time. And in the early days of the era of home users using the Internet, doubtless many people learned the same thing.

Fast forward to today. Facebook is easily the largest social network, and it requires you to use your full name; if you don't, you're violating their Terms of Service and they reserve the right to make your acccount go poof.

"But Sophie," you say, "Just don't use Facebook if you don't like their policies!"

Great idea... except for two things:

a) More sites are now using Facebook's Comments Box 'social plugin' to enable commenting on their site.
b) There are some people (for example, Scoble of scobleizer.com) who think that people should be forced to use their 'real' names, or else they don't regard their comments/opinions as valid.

It should be noted here that when people like the above refer to 'real' names, they invariably mean 'offline' names, but word it that way because they feel that any other names are not 'real' and are thus 'fake'. The only real name you have is the one that legally applies to you, apparently.

(Okay, so I guess they have a point in that names are how we identify people, and if we didn't have names we'd all be numbers instead. But although I'm sure some people probably would prefer being known as such if it stopped people using their 'real' name, those same people will probably find it infinitely preferable if other people used whatever name that they *wanted* other people to use. Names have meanings, whether they're given by the origin language itself or simply by emotional attachment.)

What I'm trying to say is that not every deviation from a 'real' name is done to make us anonymous. In fact, it's quite the opposite - people can still be identified by whatever name they choose in a particular environment; that's what names are for, and that goes against the very definition of 'anonymous'.(*) Instead, most individual people I know (that is to say, even individual members of a plural system can do this) who are using a different name are doing it in order to separate various identities. Note that this isn't always the same as trying to *hide* the other identities. For example, in some religions, people can have completely different names from how people might know them outside of their religion, but they don't go out of their way to hide their legal name from people.(**)

Then comes the question - if you're not trying to hide your other identities, why not just use the other identity's name in the first place? Hopefully that question has been answered for you by way of the example I gave, but in case it hasn't - it very much depends on context. If someone has a different name on the Internet than they do in real life(***), then they're probably going to want to use that name, because it's part of their identity, and it's only polite to use whatever name they're going by in that context, not least because it may cause offense (or even danger) otherwise.

Of course, there are people who don't mind, or whose choice of name is restricted by availability - which is a particularly common problem with usernames on the Internet. Some of those people might like their username better; some may prefer another name. In both cases you should refer to them with whatever name they *want* to be called. (And if you don't know, you should ask.)

Hopefully I've made my point clear; when it comes to names, there is no single 'real name' for a lot of people. And this is why I don't like the Facebook Comments Box, since it would force you to use a real name even on sites which otherwise have nothing to do with Facebook. Like, say, TechCrunch. (See also this response to the rollout.)

One more thing. The 'danger' I referred to above may have got some of you thinking that's a bit overdramatic and not common at all, certainly not in an environment like I'm journalling this entry from.

But the truth is, as much as it might sound overdramatic, it's really not. People are in danger all the time from people who think that if they know someone's 'real' identity, that they're allowed to enter that side of their life. This is particularly true when the person whose 'real' identity was revealed is a member of an unprivileged group, because often the prevailing attitude is that unprivileged groups are inferior or subordinate to privileged ones. (If you're not aware what I mean by "unprivileged groups", you may want to take a look at brown_betty's post A primer on privilege: what it is and what it isn't, as it gives a good introduction to it.)

I actually use Facebook occasionally. However, Facebook is not the Web, and it shouldn't try to become so. I hope this entry has made clear why I believe that.

(a big thanks to marahmarie for her posts prompting me to write this epic entry. It's not often I agree with her, but on this point I do.)

[edit: vampwillow points out in the comments that Etsy has recently exposed people's legal names to the world without telling anyone, and people can now connect your purchases to your legal name simply by searching on your legal name, something which was previously impossible. If you use Etsy, you may want to follow the instructions in the linked article to prevent this.]