so i just got a thing from facebook saying that if i don't 1) prove to them what my "real name" is and 2) make it public for everyone to see and use however they like, i won't be allowed on facebook anymore. i don't know if this happened because somebody reported me for not agreeing with them or if it's just something facebook doing. i don't see anyone else reacting to anything like that, so i'm going to assume i've been somewhat singled out for this "attention".
from an emotional standpoint, i've basically just been told that all of my friends will be dead next week unless i put myself at risk. because there's a reason i don't want to use my "real name" as my facebook handle, and it's not just "i want to be cool online." (although, we'll see that's actually one of the reasons, to a certain degree.)
I have a unique name (especially my last name), but it's easy to spell, so it's easy to remember in print. what this means is that most of the people in my life who i would very much like to not have to be honest with (and i would... and it would not be pleasant) know absolutely nothing about me other than my legal name. every other part of my online "persona" is just me. it's the same way i'd be in "real life". i just happen to have a past that's littered with people who went out of their way to know exactly nothing about me besides what the name on the bank account looked like. i'm not worried about my identity being known. that's never been the problem. i haven't done anything.
something bad happened to me and it makes me uncomfortable having my first and last name on a public forum like facebook because that information will return my home address on any search engine. the "something bad" included some pretty heavy duty gaslighting, and i'm going to be really upset if anyone around where i live brings up anything about what happened unprompted.
what happened to me? "what happened to me." in the end, what it boils down to is that i married the wrong man. i married the wrong man and his "family" ripped mine to shreds. given the nature of the legal aspects of my family being vaporized in front of my eyes for, as i understand it, government grant money, i have no doubt that were the people involved given the opportunity to involve themselves again, it would start back up. these are people who believe they have a personal stake in, essentially, dirtying my reputation, and they have a good pitch. they're able to generate credibility for themselves just based on being able to call themselves fancy titles because that's how my ex husband's government works. i'm just a crazy old dingbat who's just now figuring out how to graduate from junior college. the people talking about me would be calling themselves "representative" and "liaison" and "chairperson", and it wouldn't matter that they're basically lilliputian titles, the fancypantsieness will be enough to plant that seed of doubt that will grow into a few weeks of slowly having to experience everything i now know and love change into a wasteland of hatred and resentment until finally i'm no longer welcome in my own life... again.
i got the message when my family kicked me out. all i want now is to be able to get a job that pays my rent. my motivation for obscuring certain details about my legal identity is, to a large extent, being let to live what's left of my life in peace.
so you can see why it would seem easier to me to just... not have my real name out in public. but that's just my personal reason. i actually have a larger moral context from which to restrict access to my legal name in certain settings. i don't want my legal name on my public facebook profile for the same reason i don't want it spray painted across the front of my house or tattooed across my forehead, and people who happen by my facebook profile who i don't know anything about don't need to know my name any more than the guy in line in front of me at the grocery store does. wouldn't it be creepy if every stranger you saw somehow knew your name? that's not how real life "social networks" operate. a name is something you get to know about a person, not something handed to you on a platter by virtue of you having shown up. people should have to ask.
and not for nothing, but there's scientific research that says your name does something special in your mind. it's not like other noises or even other words. it's one of those things that transcends the part of your consciousness it's a part of and becomes other parts of you. when someone says your name, it activates parts of your brain that other words and sounds don't activate the same way music doesn't activate the same parts of the brain that the sound of a lawnmower does. so i don't think i'm being untoward by considering my name something i offer as a token of friendship. i'm not a celebrity or anything, so my real name is still my name. it's not property, not a commodity.
have i given my real name to people online? yeah, i have. i'll be honest, i've lied to a lot more people than i've told. usually strangers get a lie. they'll get the name "kristin polroniczac" (and if you believe this to be my name, i'm afraid you've been misled, and i apologize). that's actually my real middle name and my father's mother's maiden name. my name isn't quite so exotic, but it pairs with pejoratives fairly well, so i got tired of hearing it from people i didn't want to hear it from at a pretty young age. i monitor whether or not i give it to strangers, and strangers who aren't going to matter once i close the chat window tend not to get told any private information. it's just safer that way online.
there are two types of online people who know my name. well, one type of person and one other person. there are the people who know me in real life, people i've met or family or whatever... and then there's one person who i told because i wanted them to know (and the liekly two to five people that person told, depending on the validity of my sample size and strength of my inferences).
{a betrayal at which, btw, i am appropriately consumed with rage, because that's the fun part} :-P
which is the other, mostly stupid reason i like using a pseudonym on social media, even though i think its pretty obvious that i'm not trying to hide who i am or what i do in any way. but i have this little tiny bit of myself to romanticise and make special for no other reason than that it's a part of me and i can. people talk all the time about how social media is killing interpersonal communication, but i think maybe the pundits are missing the whole point of the social media. using an obvious pseudonym allows me to generate a certain amount of presence, even in people who find it trite. the reason it's a "tradition" to use a pseudonym online is because people who aren't very socially adept figure out how to use other things as a means of starting a conversation. it's called "having a personality". the handle i use tells the people who encounter it as much as what i'm wearing would tell them about me if they saw me on the street. to my knowledge, i don't wear a nametag.
and if anyone's out there reading this and going, "you're seriously whining about facebook?" first of all, thank you for having read this far. second, yeah, of course i am. i really like having the facebook account that i have in my life and facebook just told me i'm going to lose it in seven days unless i stop being me. it's going to suck. what else is there? youtube comments? twitter? 140 characters... right, there's a conversation, awesome, thanks. and the only people who have ever looked at my blog are when i crosspost on facebook. and all the facebook notes go... and my past posts... my history just disappears.
i actually don't have a choice but to change my profile to show my real name. i lose a giant chunk of who i am if i don't. but i won't be able to use it to interact with the public anymore. i can post to the friends i have now and that's it. i can't interact with the facebook profiles of my school or my news or my groups or anything. facebook's real name policy will make it so the social part of their "social media" will exclude me. i'll keep asking for the right to use the name i choose for all the reasons i've put here. hopefully facebook will decide to acknowledge my existence and i'll be able to be a person there again. as long as they think being narcs is more important than being a social media platform, the only people they're going to be allowed to publicly narc on me to are the people already on my friends list.
update: i ended up saying screw it and opened a new facebook page. www.facebook.com/z3ropoint68 (still not my name... but still me)
