"real" names versus names

[kalmn]

i didn't used to get why people might not want the name they use online to be easily attachable to their legal name.

due to various things going on in my life at the moment, i now totally get it.

i get it so much that i'm screening comments to this post, i tell ya.

i think that people's names, of whatever form, should be able to be traced back to them, by people in the community where they use that name. but that's different from "easily attachable to their legal name".

eta: if you're okay with me unscreening please say so.

Comments

[sraun]

I am perfectly happy with having a nickname associated with a live person in a social group, as long as everyone knows who nickname is. I've forgotten - was Blue Petal before your time? He was an active Minn-StF'er in the 70's & 80's. There were a handful of people who knew Blue's real name - I was one, I could find it again if I wanted to. But he responded to Blue, everyone knew him as Blue, everywhere in fandom he was Blue Petal. The only time you ever saw his birth name was when he handed over a check.

An on-line example might be womzilla.

There's a 'your badge name must be your real name' philosophy - the exception is 'if you have a fannish identity not associated with your real name, we'll put that on the badge'. My complaint is that it makes it nearly impossible to develop a fannish identity.

It's an interesting problem - what we really care about is identity, and the related responsibility to accept consequences. When someone is a troll, or flaming lunatic, or a really neat person, we want to know. If some causes chaos and then drops the identity, and starts over again using a new identity, we want to associate them.

Linking a fannish identity to a mundane identity when the owner does not do it themselves is at the very least rude - at most it may be a nuclear bomb equivalent. If you do that to someone, then at the very least you have to allow it to be done to you. I think the same thing applies to on-line/off-line identities.

This all ties in to 'what information do I consider public and what do I consider private, and who knows which?' And keeping the information separated can get very exciting - at some point, if you've let enough people in a group know a piece of information, it becomes public for the group. At what point does it become irrevocably public?

Back in the days of minicon-l, there was a ... heated discussion about whether or not the Minicon Operations Logs should be put on-line raw or edited. One of the advocates of raw is now a well-know Handgun Carry Activist, and had a carry permit at the time. Practically everyone who'd been in Ops (with the possible exception of Keypers & Gofers), Treasury and the Exec for several years knew this. To the best of my recollection, there was a note in the Ops Log for the year in question saying 'if you see so-and-so with a gun, don't worry about it - it's legal'. When I mentioned this on minicon-l, asking if that should be edited out, he metaphorically tore me a new one for mentioning it. (He never did respond to "Well, do you still think the raw logs should go up?") So - this was an open secret in Minn-StF and the people running Minicon. The members of minicon-l were - to the best of my knowledge - all members of that community. I asked, in front of a community that all knew the secret, whether or not the owner of said secret really wanted it shared with the whole world. Did I do anything wrong?

You may unscreen this - I believe I've been sufficiently vague that no one who doesn't already know any of the principals will recognize them.