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managing identity
Aug. 23rd, 2009 10:55 amSo, here's my shiny new fannish journal.
Online identity is such a strange thing. Back in high school, when I was first getting involved in fandom (via ff.n, of course) I had to hide the fact that I was participating in anything online from my mother. Like many parents of my subgeneration, she was incredibly, impossibly freaked out by the very idea of her child having an online identity--sexual predators would leap out of the e-bushes, apparently, and drag me through the tubes to their evil lairs.
Late in high school and early in college, a few decisions and a few accidents meant that my livejournal got pretty irreversibly linked to my RL identity—not just in the "attached to my real name" sense, but also in the "read by nonfannish friends" sense. This was around the time that fandom was really migrating to livejournal, so my online identity was starting to consolidate there rather than being scattered across messageboards. This hasn't had any external repercussions that I know of—I'm honestly more concerned about future employers stumbling across my high school brattiness than my fannish juvenilia—but it wound up restricting the way I presented myself online in some pretty major ways. I was learning a lot, right then, about how to compartmentalize in healthy/useful ways, but my online identity became one I couldn't really compartmentalize. I ultimately responded pretty lurktastically.
This guy I know is a published novelist. He's a smart guy. I'd probably like his work, but I can't seek it out: he writes under a pen name, and I don't know it. No one who knows him knows it, actually, except of course his agent. He says that if other people knew the link, the well would dry up on him; the place his novel-creativity comes from is personal in a twitchy way. It reminds me of Millay's "Bluebeard."
And so. I am in a place right now where putting myself out there is difficult, and I use that phrase without clarifying context because I mean so many of its meanings. I find myself growing more and more passive. I want to have a compartment that's defined by its activity.
Online identity is such a strange thing. Back in high school, when I was first getting involved in fandom (via ff.n, of course) I had to hide the fact that I was participating in anything online from my mother. Like many parents of my subgeneration, she was incredibly, impossibly freaked out by the very idea of her child having an online identity--sexual predators would leap out of the e-bushes, apparently, and drag me through the tubes to their evil lairs.
Late in high school and early in college, a few decisions and a few accidents meant that my livejournal got pretty irreversibly linked to my RL identity—not just in the "attached to my real name" sense, but also in the "read by nonfannish friends" sense. This was around the time that fandom was really migrating to livejournal, so my online identity was starting to consolidate there rather than being scattered across messageboards. This hasn't had any external repercussions that I know of—I'm honestly more concerned about future employers stumbling across my high school brattiness than my fannish juvenilia—but it wound up restricting the way I presented myself online in some pretty major ways. I was learning a lot, right then, about how to compartmentalize in healthy/useful ways, but my online identity became one I couldn't really compartmentalize. I ultimately responded pretty lurktastically.
This guy I know is a published novelist. He's a smart guy. I'd probably like his work, but I can't seek it out: he writes under a pen name, and I don't know it. No one who knows him knows it, actually, except of course his agent. He says that if other people knew the link, the well would dry up on him; the place his novel-creativity comes from is personal in a twitchy way. It reminds me of Millay's "Bluebeard."
And so. I am in a place right now where putting myself out there is difficult, and I use that phrase without clarifying context because I mean so many of its meanings. I find myself growing more and more passive. I want to have a compartment that's defined by its activity.
