liz_marcs | Who are you? It's a dangerous question, but I suppose that's the point...

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Who are you? It's a dangerous question, but I suppose that's the point...

Musings on identity.

Who are we? Are we who we say we are, or are we who others believe we are? Okay, not exactly "to be or not to be," but this really is the question.

I'm having a bit of identity disconnect at the moment. I'd like to blame the economy. I'd like to blame my innate need to knock virtual wood. I'd like to blame a lot of things.

But the truth is, I find myself in a bit of a quandary on this point. It's amusing and bemusing in many ways.

It all starts *counts on fingers* 17 years ago or so. Back in the day I was a newspaper reporter, but I was fascinated with this whole Usenet thing. (Yes, Virginia, there was a time before the Web.) I wanted to dip my toe in the online world, in large part because I was (and still am) positively fascinated by how people in other parts of the world lived and thought.

I also figured that it would be just my luck that someone who actually knew me would catch me when I was having a bad online day and I'd find myself up shit creek without a paddle.

The answer to me seemed obvious: use a fake name.

And behold, one Lizbeth Marcs was born.

I think my ev0l plan was commonsense, although it's turning out to be kind of prescient in a way. As I've discovered to my vast amusement, the Internet really never forgets anything. It's kind of amazing to trace my footsteps going back that many years on Google. It really is.

And if there's instances where ol' Lizbeth may have been a bit of a bitch, so what? She was exactly as real as I wanted her to be.

Except now we're living in the age of Catch-22. Prospective employers and other random people you come across in real life will Google your name. If nothing shows up under your RL name, they'll back away slowly because, well, something doesn't look right there does it?

You're equally in as much trouble if they Google your name and embarrassing crap comes up. Jobs could be lost, job offers rescinded, loans turned down...in short, your life could be made somewhat more difficult without you even knowing it.

To plant a flag on the virtual frontier under your real name or not, that is an interesting question with no good answer at all.

It isn't like I'm planning to leave my job (in fact, I love my job), and my company seems to be riding the economic suck fairly well (knock wood), but you never know.

What if one day I show up and the doors are locked? Or I find myself looking for a job because the company will be closing in the near future?

Every single job Web site tells you: Make sure you have a RL profile somewhere on the Internet under your own name, if only so prospective employers (and loan officers, and other official-type people who can make your life difficult) will find some proof that you know how to deal with the Web and interacting electronically.

This has special urgency for me because, believe it or not, my name is rare. As in really rare. There's only 2 other people with my RL name on the Internet. One's a high school student in the Midwest. The other person is a bit of a...well, let's just say I really don't want to be confused with her.

So, in the modern equivalent of magical thinking ("If I do this, I'll never really need it..."), I've planted a flag under my RL name via LinkedIn and Facebook.

As for Twitter, I'm still not sure how I feel about it. And even if I do plant a flag there, I'm not sure which name I'll use.

To say I'm uncomfortable with this situation doesn't even begin to cover it.

The fact is, in many ways Lizbeth Marcs, this identity right here, is just as real as my RL identity.

Maybe it comes down to this: Lizbeth Marcs is just a name, but the person behind it is the same person whatever name they go by.

But there's still this mental disconnect, in large part because I have to keep my RL identity and Lizbeth Marcs completely walled off from each other. It doesn't help that this little voice in my head keeps squeaking, "Don't let the wank streams cross! Don't let them cross!"

And if they cross, BOOM! Big BOOM! One has too much history, the other is a blank slate.

In a way, it's rather interesting.

I've been active in the online world for 17 years in one form or another. Lizbeth Marcs has connections going back 17 years, so planting a flag at a new online outpost isn't all that big of a deal. There'll always be familiar names somewhere in the mix. It's like being a citizen of Internet who has virtual neighbors and friends.

But my RL name is a total neophyte. She only knows a handful of people online. She's starting from the ground floor. And maaaaaaan, it is not easy. Planting the flag is the easy part. Pinging potential virtual neighbors and waiting for a response is hard.

It's not easy being a newbie while being an old hand at the same time, especially when you can't ever let the two identities interact or even share information.

I guess I'm one of those people who'll never need to dip a toe into SecondLife. As it turns out, I'm living it for reals.

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Know what you mean about the unusual name thing. Ahem.

I'm there on FB, and will happily respond to you. Szandara is there too, I think, though not as actively.

You've been well and truly pinged on several fronts.

Today was my LinkedIn day, too. :-)

I'm not sure what is worse: being a one and only, or being one of the few when one of the few is a little bit of a dicey character.

So, I know that this doesn't really help you at all, but can I just say that this is one huge reason that I *love* my name? With as many people as have my real name, it provides virtual anonymity on the internet. There are ways to find me if you add in enough info, but just a search of my name, I don't show up on the first 10 Google pages.

It's a bit awesome.

Oh, and if you want a friend on Facebook, I'll happily friend you, but I should warn I've got other fandom friends on there too, so you might get some (ahem) crossover there.

You either, huh? I don't pop up on any of the first ten Google or Google Image pages that I checked. *grin*

Stop rubbing it in, you.

Well, they probably won't know who I am, and I suspect that your fandom friends are probably the same fandom friends I'd bring over, so it probably won't be so bad.

And you're right. There are zillions of you over there.

It's anonymity through crowd-blending. It's awesome. It's also the reason my dad has trouble tracing our family history.

Which is the good thing about Facebook. You can make a stressless RL identity and crossover your trusted old friends.

I have my shit locked down because of the students. I have a reason not to have an online identity. I don't WANT to connect with my kids online.

Eeeep. You're in a difficult situation for sure.

I find myself nodding in agreement with your post and the responses on this subject. FB is buttoned-down me, and LJ is real me. I think.

Yeah, the uniqueness of my name has me twitchy about having an online presence using it. And keep my private life separate from things I don't care if they are publicly known.

But that's a really interesting point about how having -something- you control online being protective. And I was just at a meeting related to my profession, where people were discussing that very thing: how if you don't have a Facebook profile, you're invisible to the world, and in this economic environment - especially if you are unemployed or might get laid off, that's a Bad Thing.

I've been thinking for months, though, that I need to at least sign up for LinkedIn, cause that doesn't seem to be as full of pitfalls as Facebook.

LinkedIn is definitely the safest bet because it does give you maximum control over who is linked to you and who isn't.

Facebook is slightly more twitchy. You can lock down everything, but once you let them in, you can't always control what they put on your wall, i.e., pictures from back in the day when you were young and dumb.

That said, I don't have a lot of dumb pictures of me floating around out there, so I feel reasonably safe-ish with Facebook.

But, yeah, the whole Thou Shalt Not Be Invisible is definitely a bite in the backside.

I know about the rare name thing. Up until 2001 or so I was the only one on the internet. Now there's I think two or three more.

In a funny way, I'm currently doing it the other way round. All my previous net activity - and it was a lot & at the time prominent in its own subculture - was under my real name. The whole livejournal fanfic thing is the first time I've, more or less consistently, built up a separate identity. And I'm not sure I like it. I guess I was unsure when I dipped my toe in the writing again. And now it's kind of a habit. One I'm not sure I like because it somehow smells like embarrassment to me.

And I've totally forgotten any point I was trying to make.

In my case, my nom de Internet was strictly protective, because I worked for people and organizations that would've gotten their panties in a twist if I was anything more than a button-down gal.

So, there's never been a sense of shame attached, but under my nom de Internet I can actually be more honest because I don't have the sense that someone will eventually look over my shoulder and become offended by what they see.

I've had this online name for fifteen years. It's me, pretty much. People digging online will find in stages a proud Witch, a militant childfree advocate, an occultist, a geek, a fangirl, and a blogger. Even in my 'militant' stage, I never stooped to ugliness- I knew that things could come back to haunt me. I suppose that's the advantage of understanding that there are people on the other side of that 'cloud', not pixels.

People who meet me in real life often remark on how 'down to earth' I am- whatever that means. I'm me. I'm a lousy actor, and it's better to live in truth than to live a lie.

I chose my somewhat gender-ambivalent name back when being identifiably female online- especially USENET, was to become a pervert magnet. I didn't want people to get hung up in my gender- I wanted a gender-free experience. I succeeded. Even today, people sometimes think I'm a guy, or can't decide.

I don't mind. I answer to both "Sunfell" and my own name. Sunfell is merely my pixel-Presence. It's the same person on the keys.

Any ugly tended to be in the political/religious realm. Back in the day, I was on a Usenet history group and we used to get these dominionist invaders who'd try to overwhelm our group insisting that the U.S was a Christian nation and doing some really invasive witnessing.

I can't tell you how many nights I stayed up ala XKCD along with a few others beating them back with facts, figures, and quotes from historical documents. Then we'd rinse and repeat the process.

There was another Usenet group that was a watchdog group I belonged to where my real name-doppleganger with the iffy rep invaded with some of her cohorts (that's how I first found out about her, so I've known about her for years) tried to spam and shut it down. It was weird going 'round and 'round with someone bearing my real name under the cover of my Nom de Internet.

But, honestly, that was about as "bad" as I ever got. Lord knows I wasn't polite in these instances, because I lack some serious patience on certain fronts. *grin*

But it is a problem in that too many people forget there's a human being on the other side of the keyboard. I try not to forget, although I admit there are times when I'm more "curt" than I'd be in a face-to-face convo.

I have done something similar with Facebook. Although, I have my FB profile locked down so tight it may as well be the Pentagon. I'm pretty sure I'm pushing the FB privacy filters to their limits of flexibility and I've discovered all sorts of bugs between local and global settings, etc. Their biggest failure is the lack of dynamic filtering, but I suppose that would eat up bandwidth and server space like a horde of leaf-cutter ants in a rain forest.

I can't blame you for locking everything down.

As for the privacy settings *rolls eyes* I don't trust 'em in general, but Facebook's seem especially weak. *yuck* I just opted out of entering some information completely rather than trust their locks.

Yet, as rigid and as "idiot-proof" as FB seems to be, it's controls aren't the most intuitive. I've been playing with the damn thing for a couple of days, and I swear I'm having a hard time grasping all the nuances.

I'm beginning to suspect that there aren't any and I'm over thinking the whole thing.

Getting an audience sucks. In comparison, it's so easy to attract someone to your fandom journal with the porn.

Pr0n is the coin of the realm. *firmly nods*

In all seriousness, though, in fandom it's fairly easy to make connections because there's things you automatically have in common. In RL swinging in the Internet winds, it's not always that easy to find the commonality.

Huh. Googling my name doesn't turn up anything even REMOTELY related to me within the first five pages... lots of hits for some youth pastor in the Midwest, though. *grin*

Hells, not even searching for my name in combination with my college or my high school seems to turn up any relevant hits. Surreal. It's like my screen name here has pretty much subsumed any other web presence, which generally speaking I'm OK with, but which also reminds me of how inconspicuous I have a unconscious habit of trying to be in real life. Weird.

*slits my eyes at you*

Veeeery strange if you ask me. Although maybe it's because your last name's unusual? Or the combination of your first and last?

Part of my problem is my last name is kind of rare. And the combination of mismatched first and last name begins to border on hen's teeth, even though my first name's kinda common.

But, yeah, Lizbeth Marcs definitely overwhelms me real name in terms on online presence.

My last name's not that unusual, methinks. *grin* On the other hand, my LJ user name -- which I've pretty much used exclusively online for the last ten or twelve years, ever since I stumbled over Hotmail back in college -- gets plenty of hits. And that one IS pretty much unique.

... although it means something UTTERLY different from what I thought it did originally, as I discovered when I took a Japanese language class. *grin*

My real name is unusual enough that I am basically the only one of me out there. (Thanks, crazy parents! Shoulda named me Jennifer like everyone else's mother and father did.)

I've also been online for a very long time. Long enough to have burned through a couple online identities which I can no longer use, because I don't want to have to deal with a lot of people from Back Then--actually, in terms of keeping my real name off the net, having a crazy ex boyfriend who has been net savvy since before Mosaic turned out to be a blessing in abusive disguise. It means that the only things with my full real first name on them are a couple posts to rec.music.toriamos or something and some archived listings of BBS numbers, including ones I ran. (My REALLY embarrassing past history, thank goodness, was single-line.)

I have a real life presence that involves initials and my last name, which will have to do. And I'm more "me" here than anywhere associated with Legal Me.

I've been somewhat lucky in that I haven't had stalkers, or rather, none that knew my real name, let alone my online identity. (Looooooong story.) It's weird, but by real name is...well...pretty clean of problems overall.

Like I said, my caution was more related to the fact I didn't want anyone at work accidentally stumbling across me online. This despite the fact that I was online back in the Windows 3.1 days, which shows that I must've been really, really paranoid.

Then again, the Internet was a much smaller place back then.

This just inspired me to Google my name..something I've never done before. Turns out that in the USA there are about 20 people with my name. Huh.

It's amazing what you discover when you Google your real name.

The funny thing is, I've known about the RL person who shares my name with the iffy rep going back to my Usenet days. I came across her on some Usenet group and we got into a little bit of round of flaming at each other (she was invading the group in an effort to shut it down along with her cohorts).

It was damn strange to be flaming my RL name under the cover of my Nom de Internet.

I was surprised, to say the least. But kind of relieved that I wasn't actually among the listed..guess I'm not a public personage. Which is not a bad thing, for me.
Strange to know I share my name with so many others, though.

I never thought of myself as a person with a common name, but there's enough of 'me' on Facebook that I added in my middle name for good measure. And as my connections of Facebook grown, mixing all sorts of portions of my life, it feels a wee bit out of control.

The whole question of 'what happens when your name is googled' piqued my curiosity. I'd known there was a woman who'd been a (not terribly famous) women's professional sport figure, but I hadn't realized we were born about 6 weeks apart. And she's got a Wiki entry. I really need to work on my level of infamy to trump that.

Yeah, the person with my RL name and iffy rep is about my age.

The only saving grace is that she doesn't live anywhere near me, which is a plus.

But it is funny to find someone who does share your name. I just Googled my name again while answering people, and there appears to be a fourth person with my name out there, but she's on the young-ish side. And the teenager is going to college this year.

Funny what you can discover.

On the upside, stuff that was published under my RL name years ago are starting to float to the surface of Google, so it's not all bad.

I've never been able to keep a persona separate, even if the name is all that is different.

I figure if an employer is that uptight I don't want to work for them anyway. Screw 'em.

That said, my first name, maiden name, and married name are all pretty common.

(also:

minim_calibre "Shoulda named me Jennifer like everyone else's mother and father did."

<cough> :D )

Heeee!

The thing is, I know where I work would get a little uptight about my fannish activities. I work in publishing, and intellectual property is the thing. Yet, that's really the only thing they're uptight about.

So, yeah. I can see both arguments, but for me this works (or I hope it will).

I definitely just tried googling my name...and found all of two articles with an exact match (and they were actually me! Listed among about 100 other people...) Everything else was people who either shared my last name, or had my first name as their last name. XD My first name? Uncommon first name. Not-so-uncommon surname.

*burns with envy*

I probably wouldn't be trying to establish an online presence for my real name if it wasn't for the fact that someone with an iffy rep shares my real name.

It's strange that in order to protect myself from any potential embarrassment or mix-up, I have to "go public." It's kind of nuts.

One's from my high school's newsletter - people who got honours in first term. XD The other's a list of people who participated in a high school summer research program.

It's strange that in order to protect myself from any potential embarrassment or mix-up, I have to "go public."

That is definitely an odd feeling to have.

I'm kind of having your problem in reverse. See, I am pathologically incapable of separating identities. Obviously, like anyone else, I am not quite the same person with family as I am with one group of friends or another, but I move between these "mini identities" really smoothly, constantly me. And I'm just entering the workforce. So now I'm not sure how to separate the stuff that I'd rather keep pseudonymous from the stuff employers might want to see. In getting a facebook I've deliberately set things up so that people I know in RL can find my livejournal, which is my online HQ, with minimal effort - but they DO have to go looking, they have to actually be interested - while for people I know on LJ my RL identity is not so obvious. (of course, i use the same email address for everything, and it's the same as my username, so it isn't THAT difficult, but I'm counting on the very very low probability that anybody wants to stalk me that much)

But still, I write. My blog is, you know, relevant to my employers interests. And I'm not sure how they'd react to the fanfiction, swearing and occasional questionable-sounding adventures or mental health musings. But I don't want to start a separate blog for sanitised stuff, and neither do I want to start a separate journal for said fanfiction or to lock things down, because of the aforementioned inability to compartmentalize like that. I don't know! /o\

PS - my full name in google only brings up one page from my school, and facebook - mine and some of my friends' where my name is listed as a friend or commenter. If I use Maggie instead of my full name I get some state scrabble championship stuff and... oh, apparently I am still a member of Xampy even though i can't log in... O.o

Anyway, I'm google-rare :P on the other hand a very close variation of my surname has dozens of people coming up. Wow, microbiologists and mathematicians and things. I don't know any of them though.

I get where you're coming from FB and LJ, I try and keep them as separate as possible. Those on FB that are also in LJ are there because I trust them not to let the "streams to cross" {great analogy, btw}. And vice versa.

My dad has me friended on FB (as do some recently rediscovered high school friend), I do not want nor need them knowing about LJ.

Googling me finds everyone else with my name, but you have to hunt to find reference to me specifically. OTOH, strange given my long term existence on the Web, OTOH, not so much given the number of women out there with my full name (spelling and all).

If you need another friend on FB, let me know.

My identity as a Monkey began when

engelsteorra started calling me that at work. Then the whole addiction to LJ, and a new and slightly worse problem with Facebook... on which I use my RL name.

There's one other person with my name on FB. And they're in the states.

And there's one other person with my RL name. And he's a country singer...

The upshot is, though, if the writing thing really takes off, I'm going to have find another identity - somewhere between Monkey and Matt - that means I don't get confused with a guitar wielding Dubliner with a frilly shirt and a cowboy hat.

Real Life sucks. I say keep it real - keep it Digital.

My own name is, almost, totally unique - but the good news is that there are four references to me online - one is a website I run for church, two are education prospectus entries for a course I teach - and the fourth is my Amazon wishlist! Nothing links me to the wombat that I can tell.

And I have found that there is another one of me living in Northern Ireland and helping with a scout group!

When you google my RL name, my professional website is the first hit. Even though there are quite a few other people with my name. :) That website serves as a brochure for potential clients.

When you google my RL name with Szandara, you get NOTHING. Which is the way I want it, and I periodically do a google check to make sure it stays that way. I really don't want my professional persona crossing over with my online self. There are people I trust who know both identities--you're one of them--but I really don't want random strangers who only know me in a professional context making that connection.

I'm on Facebook, under my real name, mostly to keep up with RL friends who are not on LJ. It's locked, so I have to friend you before you see it, and I don't use it much. I have a Linked-in profile under my real name.

Privacy concerns are a good part of why I flocked my journal nearly 2 years ago.

I just joined up on Facebook with my real name a few weeks ago. I'm the chair of my town's Democratic committee, and the first dozen or so people to try to friend me were fellow county democrats. Not a bad thing, but not what I was hoping for. Since then, I've managed to add a few people from college, a few from high school, and a few from the summer camp that I used to work at, which is sort of what I was hoping for. I'm terrible at keeping in touch with people (I am the ultimate example of "out of sight, out of mind"), so I'm hoping Facebook will help me do a better job of not losing track of people in RL.

A Google search for my RL name brings up mostly me (I am a lawyer in solo practice, after all, so you'd expect my name to be out there a bit). There is a guy with the same name on LinkedIn who works for Delphi in Mexico, and some freshman cross country runner, but other than that, it's just me.

As for my LJ name, I pull up a few things in Google, but not much. I use just LearnedHand on some sites, and a Google search on that name pulls up all the stuff about the jurist Learned Hand, as you'd expect.

I don't think I can let my streams cross, either. After all, I could cause myself some problems as a fanfic-writing attorney.

I was going to post something about my LJ v. Facebook experience, but I think you've just about covered what I was going to say.

So... if I've met the real you and know your real name and all that, despite being originally a friend of Lizbeth Marcs... Do I friend RL you or not? Lemme know how to proceed. =)

I think there are a lot more people without online identities than one would think. And if a prospective employer were to ask about it, you could always simply say that you don't throw your personal life all over the internet. A lot of employers, I think, would appreciate the idea that you are discreet.

With Facebook be prepared for blasts from the past. My husband got a Facebook account at the urging of a few RL friends and next thing he knew he was being friended by his old girlfriend from high shool who he hasn't seen in 20 years, someone from middle school, a person we used to build haunted houses with, etc. In no time at all he had a respectable list of people he was interacting with.

Since you're using your real name, people who have idly wondered, "What happened to (your name here)?" will track you down.

I think the more common names are better. Makes it more difficult for people to track down the ~right~ you.

I have an unusual name. I started out my online life in the naive 90' with my real name as my email name... D'Oh! but figured out that I could be waaaay more anonymous pretty quickly and had a series of online names that slowly waned until there were only 2 left.

Googling shows there are quite a few of me out there, all male and some very weird. Dunno about that...

My ~real~ name is out there because of career/professional publications... but I'm still pretty invisible as a female, which I think is most likely a good thing. Oh, and one mention that resulted via a private group when one of the members (in Australia) wrote a piece for a national magazine =0. Now I'm worldwide. =( with way more information than I was happy sharing with the internets...

I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook and keep them both locked down enough to keep me off of Google. I figure that most of the people that I would ~want~ to find me have sufficient avenues without me waving from the stage.

One of the things I've noticed on Facebook is the lack of ~safe~ sharing of information. So many people have their complete birthdate and phone numbers available for the picking and since we don't know how trustworthy FB really is with our info? I'd rather opt for the paranoid.

I'm just really really glad that the internets weren't available during my reckless feckless youth! =0

Interesting discussions.

Hmmm, No matter what name I have i'm still me :D

Fortunately, or unfortunately, whichever way you happen to see it, LOL.

But I can see where you're coming from.

I think I'd have just opened another LJ under my real name. I hate Facebook and MySpace both.

I keep my online life strictly separated from my RL, because even if nothing can hurt me, it might hurt one of my kids. I live in a very conservative part of the country and my views are a little too radical for some of these folks still stuck in the stone ages. So yeah, I lock everything down.

Then there are those people who claim we all take the internet too seriously! It'z Teh Internetz don'tcha know.

I think there are a lot of young people that are going to get bit on the butt by that later when they're out of HS and Uni trying to find respectable jobs. This is the age of the internet. They see it as a playground, but there're some serious things here as well.

You're still you no matter what name you go by;) A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet:) And a skunk smells like a skunk no matter what you call it, LOL. I'm drawn to the personality behind the name, not the name. I'm always surprised if someone says they're using their real name, I just got used to user names instead of Joan, or Jim, 11 years ago when I finally jumped into the deep end of the online world to sink or swim:). Heck I didn't discover fan fiction until, ohh let's see...maybe 7 years ago. I think that's about right.

So maybe you feel like you can't really be you, and liz_marcs is the real you? In a way that's true, cause you have to keep your real name squeaky clean, and shiny. To tell you the truth I always thought liz_marcs was your real name, whether that was your married name or a maiden name. and you worked for some kind of publication or other. I never even tried to dig around to find out. I reckon if someone wants me to know that stuff they'll tell me. I just enjoy your posts, whether you're pitching a hissy, LMAO, as my grandma used to say, or talking about mundane things.

Oh, and I do miss the weather pics:)

That's what is missing on twitter by the way. LJ is like listening to a friend on the phone talking about little things they've done today, and you're interested because it's them that's doing the little things. Sometimes the turns of phrase that people use are just too funny, and sometimes they're sad.. And I'm just a curious cat about people's doings anyway, hehehe.

It's when people stop seeing a person on the other end of the posts that they become boring.

Anyway, I've blathered on long enough.

I updated my last comment on your post asking about Twitter, because I do now have a Twitter account. Just to see...

Someone I met yesterday said that, even if I didn't want to use Twitter, it made A LOT of sense to grab my username, to stop anyone else taking it.

So if I were you, I'd create a Twitter account in your real name. Just so you own it!

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Who are you? It's a dangerous question, but I suppose that's the point...

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P.S. — You've been pinged on FB...

Re: P.S. — You've been pinged on FB...

Who are you?

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