commafruit.co.uk. welcome.

I don’t know who you are, maybe you don’t either. I can look at the server logs and see where you are, what browser you’re using etc., but does that really mean you? More likely, this represents the machine you happen to be using - there is nothing human about this information.

Are you a different person on-line to the one you are off-line? Have you just one on-line identity? If you have more than one, how strictly do you segregate the different identities?
The reason I’m asking all this is that I have several on-line identities - in effect I am several different people. Until recently I’ve always kept them separate, and I’ve certainly kept them completely apart from my "real life" person. I now wonder, is this such a good thing? There are a few points to consider…

• Am I losing out by keeping the different versions of me apart? A (now ex-) coworker and I spoke a couple of months ago about his website. It’s a typical tech/geek affair, but he publishes some really quite polished articles about .Net programming, Linux, and the web. Unfortunately, he doesn’t link it to himself in real life at all, nor does he use it on his CV etc., for reasons I could not understand, beyond vague fears about privacy. It strikes me that he would be well served to use this as a showcase of skills, if only as a supplement to more concrete reference etc.
• Is it honest to be so fragmented? I maintain different handles at different hangouts on the web - could it be that this is dishonest, in that I’m never entirely frank wherever I am? I would never behave this way in real life (explicitly concealing aspects of myself from others), yet we think nothing of doing so on-line.
• Is this state of affairs sustainable? It’s not just having different names and passwords, if a behaviour or persona is altered depending on the situation/location, it could be easy to lose track of yourself, and start to blur the line between just being, and playing a character. Granted, I’ve not even begun to feel this way - but in relative terms the web is in it’s infancy, and this seems to be the direction we’re headed.

People love to say (and think) they are “not a number”^w, indicating that they are not serialisable, they are unique - but I wonder if this isn’t a fallacy. There must be thousands of people in the world with the exact same name as me (especially as I have no middle name), but I am guaranteed to be the only person with my particular mobile phone number - which I’ve had since 1999, a significant portion of my life. We can conclude from this both that simply a name is not enough to be considered one’s identity, and that if other identification methods (such as numbers) are more effective in distinguishing people, they should not be dismissed.

The reason I’m bringing all this up is that lately I’ve been changing my attitude to identity, especially on-line. While before I liked to keep everything separate, semi-anonymous, and certainly in no way linked to my off-line self, now I’m looking at consolidating a few usernames and opening up a bit more. The first thing that brought all this on has been the way social networking has shifted the way I (and I think others) view interaction with the web. Where previously it was just accepted that one had a pseudonym for use on-line, sites such as Facebook not only encourage you to use your real name, but demand that the you use a valid email address (or they used to, I’m aware that Facebook have since opened their doors - more on this and Facebook in general later I think).
Even more recently, the thing that’s made me think seriously about acknowledging this site in particular as my own is that I’ve been slowly updating my (as yet mediocre) portfolio. If this is to have any value in attracting clients, demonstrating myself etc, it must be provably linked to me as an individual.

The problem of identity management will ultimately come down to individual preference - people have to work out for themselves the method which works out best for them.
Myself, I’m going to take care to be mindful that I am in fact a single entity, and make sure that my output reflects that.

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