What's in a name?

I remember the days when people had two separate Facebook profiles, one for work/professional and then their "real" one. I still have a few friends who have Facebook profiles that don't have their real names because of various reasons. One of my friends it is because she is an elementary teacher and doesn't want her privacy of her real life taken from her by a parent or student finding her on Facebook.

A good example of other very serious reasons as to why someone would want to use another name was brought up in an article this week by Danah Boyd. What if someone was a rape victim or had been harassed? That is more than enough reason to want to change your name online to keep from having something like that follow you.

The discussion this week is about online identities and how you portray yourself online. I like what Van Dijck discussed in his article You have one identity: performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn. He discusses about the move from connectedness to connectivity. The idea of connectivity is something that is on the rise with social media research and I agree with him that we have moved from just wanting to connect with people to wanting to be connected to people via social media.

Over time people have been able to use this to their advantage by "cheating"the system. I know I have done it before. We have talked a lot before in other classes about the presentation of yourself online and this is a good example of that.By choosing what you want to show and how you want to frame it you can become anything you want online. In the article Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media the authors Marwick and Boyd state "To manage an environment where information is easily reproduced and broadcast, we find that many teenagers conceptualize privacy as an ability to control their situation,including their environment, how they are perceived, and the information that they share."

So, to change a name or not to change a name? I believe that it is everyone's right to be able to choose whether they want to go by their name or a pseudonym. After all people such as "Mark Twain" have been doing that since before Facebook was even though of.