Anonymity à la carte
Prior to some work with a client a couple of weeks ago, I signed up for a Facebook account, just so I could demonstrate some stuff. At the time, I didn’t feel like going through the whole rigmarole of filling out a profile, so I skipped all that. This week, prompted by a friend request from my Twizzlers dealer (Jeremy Pepper), I populated my profile a bit, added some pictures, and just generally enjoyed the ease of using the site. Such a contrast with MySpace!
Very early this morning, I was out dancing and having a good time in a North London late bar, under Antoine’s watchful eye, when someone asked me, “Are you on Facebook?” Flush with the excitement of my new account (and several drinks), I said yes, and gave this guy - a friendly journalist and self-described libertarian who is three years younger than my little brother - my name.
“Whew!” I thought this morning, “It’s a good thing my name is so hard to spell and everyone was drinking so much!” Except my name apparently isn’t THAT hard to spell, because I’ve got a new friend on Facebook. (Hi, Alexander!)
The unoriginal thought strikes me that this guy - and all his equally young friends - probably ask everyone they meet if they are on Facebook, and it’s no big deal to them. Meanwhile, I’ve had two friends (in my own age group) tell me in the last week that they “feel like a stalker” for reading my blog. I find myself somewhere in between the two attitudes: I want to have my blogs and my Flickr account and my Facebook account, but I don’t particularly want to talk in detail about any of those things when I’m offline. There’s no faster way to make me cringe than to start a sentence with, “So I was reading your blog…” (Also, when I’m out having a good time, I don’t want to talk about my work or who I am. I’m just a girl having a good time, okay?) All of which makes it supremely stupid of me to have given my real name to some stranger in one of my favourite places to be anonymous.
No, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either. I wonder what Danah Boyd would say.
Filed under: Life
Will you be my facebook friend too?
I don’t have ‘friends’ I don’t know and have never met.
I’m very cagey about putting photo’s of myself online there days since I ended up on the redwatch site for arguing with a nazi idiot a few years back. Nothing ever happened to me as a result & fortunately it was a pretty rubbish picture.