RSS LJ

July 8, 2011

Real life and identity (, , )

by fluffy at 6:10 PM

it is a lot easier t o keep inmiscible identities separate on the Internet if you keep thm completely separate from real life as well. I am apparently bad at both, judging by how many of my former coworkers have recently added "fluffy critter" to their circles on Google+. I mean, it was okay when it was the people who I'd let know about it to begin with (and I mean if ucblockhead hadn't known me online I'd have never had the job to begin with), but I'm not quite sure how I feel about apparently everyone else in the office knowing now too. Sigh.

Oh well. I've long felt that it's not so bad having people who actually know me actually know ME - it's the other direction I've always felt important to avoid (people trying to link my online self to my offline self in a way that makes it easy for people to know my real name which is not actually my real self). I hate people judging me by my resume and my picture and my legal name as if those are any more valid than the self I have discovered within.

I guess either direction is potentially problematic because I hate the idea that people would judge me unfairly based on stereotypes from one set of interest, and I'm still paranoid with the whole "You'll never get a job if people know about you!" thing that people have been parroting for years, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

Basically I'm complicated.

Comments

#14051 Jukka (unregistered) 07/08/2011 09:32 pm
I applied for a job at a subsidiary / branch of your former employer and I'm mildly terrified that they'll call me up and say, "Oh, you live with (whatever your 'real' name is)" and I'll just have to meekly reply, "... You mean fluffy?"

I used to try a lot harder to keep my halves separated but there's a lot of overlap and co-mingling these days.
#14052 07/08/2011 10:01 pm
This is why I roll my eyes whenever people bring up "circles" like it's the awesome new invention that's going to save social networking and make Google (another) billion bucks.

LiveJournal has had "friend filters" for a decade. And yet, in practice, things work out more complicated than that. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, etc.
#14053 07/09/2011 01:26 am
As a wise fictional demisentient once said, "The only winning move is not to play."
#14056 ucblockhead1 (unregistered) 07/09/2011 09:57 am
Google+ has some facility for this, it's just not implemented well. If you join with your real name instead of the nick you want secret, you can add the nick to your profile in a way that restricts access. Unfortunately, there's no way to have multiple nicks with different permissions.

It may be my fault as once Google+ saw us linked, you started appearing in all our coworker's suggestions. Google seems very liberal about linking, so it could be you adding me or me adding you.

More frighteningly, it may be because your nick was in my gmail contacts list. Not because I put it there, but because gmail adds things on its own.
#14057 07/09/2011 10:21 am
Yeah, I really hate the whole "who to add" thing being based simply on there being any connected path whatsoever.

The thing is it's the nickname I want public and my real name that I want secret (on the "fluffy" profile, anyway), and I want my real life stuff to be in an entirely different account. But my point is that I'm bad at keeping that separation to begin with (I mean, look at how my "professional" audio portfolio site has to link to my music site, pretty much out of necessity, and then from there it's easy to get to everything else).