In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea", names are power. The child-wizard Duny is given his true name, Ged, by his mentor Ogion. But thereafter he adopts the name Sparrowhawk, a self-selected name which acts as a shield, preventing a wizard from being seen and known as he truly is.
The first time I remember using a name for myself that wasn't my given one was at a jamboree in the early 90s. The tuck shop had facilities for making nametags. When I decided what I wanted to be called, I went with what some of the other campers called me. The name short-lived. Based on my appearance. I don't think I've been called that before or after. But it was my first experience trying on a name that didn't, in a legal or societal sense, belong to me. What is it? Doesn't matter, it's gone.
When I started calling BBSs, it was all aliases. I went through a few, the first couple the usual grandiose teenage-boy-selected variety, and the last, coincidentally and fascinatingly, the same as an ex after they changed their name two decades later.
My real name on Usenet for a number of years. Thank the incredibly-locked-down tin configuration at my ISP for that. The rest of my time online, aliases again, until I started keeping an online journal and went to a nickname, my given name in full having always felt a bit formal and out of place.
Later I learned a number of my friends from that era were just choosing new names and writing under them. Smarter than me by a mile. Years later, I call them by their real names in our group chats, and their chosen ones in my head.
How Facebook's real-name policy changed social media forever
I got my Facebook account early, back when it was academic institutions only. Weird to think that I was an early adopter of a platform I never even used that enthusiastically. One of the students I TA'd sent an invitation to me. I'm not sure why she did. We'd never talked, I just graded assignments and capitulated when people tried to wheedle a few more marks out of me. That year, that disastrous PhD year, I felt invisible as the speaker of Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole".
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
Facebook required real names. This marked a shift. LiveJournal didn't care. MySpace didn't care. But Facebook cared and we should have paid attention because eventually it would come to light that Facebook was gathering massive amounts of data about you: what you liked, what you didn't, what you'd stop to read, who you'd keep up with, who you'd creep.
I've got friends from growing up, very technical people, who have basically no online presence whatsoever. No Facebook. No LinkedIn. Nothing to connect their online activities to their name and identifiers. They're clearly smarter than a lot of us. I haven't actually deleted my Facebook account (way too convenient for sending messages to my overseas relatives), or my LinkedIn - the latter landed me a job that I worked for nearly a decade, and while I was really unhappy and always looking for an out the last few years, it was a steady job and it paid well.
Bad systems can still provide good outcomes.
But if I'm not going to disconnect entirely, leaving others wondering if I'm even alive or dead; if I'm not going to delete my socials and just leave my professional website as proof-of-life, then it's at least fair to say that I've been remaking how I want to spend my time. Posting less, writing more. Avoiding corporate platforms. Being okay with leaving people behind, and attaching fewer permanent things to my real name. I'm winter, but also other aliases too. Just because they won't change, doesn't mean that I can't. Just because corporate interests want to tie everything to my name, doesn't mean they will.