Why Facebook and Google's Concept of "Real Names" Is Revolutionary
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
We shouldn't underestimate the value of that identity, or of stepping outside the identities we have in the working world. Some people would rather be known totally and solely as the guy who posts funny stuff to Reddit and contributes to open source projects, not as the 34 year-old IT worker who gets yelled at every morning by a boss he hates.
you only have one real identity, and it is forever. a pseudonym might be a completely functional identity and just as real as your legal name, but the point is that it has a degree of freedom that you will never have with an identity built around a legal name.
Hell, even in the real world you have all this freedom. When I introduce myself as Swizec in real life, nobody questions anymore whether that's my legal real name or not. They just take it that that's what they are supposed to call me.
Pseudonymity is a much more real concept than people are willing to admit to themselves. In fact, at this very instance, everybody in the world is pseudonymous. Most just choose not to exercise this freedom.
I had never considered that the level of pseudonymity available on the Internet is available in real-life as well. Really the only thing that the real-life has which you can't change would be your DNA.
A lot conversations for this story seem to have focused on the concept of permanence with a nickname. If you use the same nickname across a multitude of services then you've created a "real" identity.
I'm trying to understand peoples reasoning for this. To me there seems to be two prevalent reasons:
1) You want your single identity to be under a name you choose, not have it be forced upon you like you real name was.
2) You want to maintain a multitude of identities each with a specific purpose.
Or it might be that when they hear my foreign accent they think it's a standard name for Slovenia.
Perhaps a combination of both ...
A bit, but in real life if you walked up to your colleagues and said "hi, I'm throwaway347" they would say "Swizec, what are you talking about?".
And if you were in the Mall and bumped into two people you know, one of them could say "Gregor (or whoever), why is that person calling you Swizec?" and vice-versa, and your multiple identities would be known to both and no longer separate or as useful.
On the internet, you can come back to HN under another name, and ask for advice about your failing company finances, or your awkward personal relationship with your cofounder, and you don't need to trust the people here to keep your confidence because you haven't shared anything tied to your identity. IRL you need to pluck up the courage to share your problems with someone who a) you know enough to value their advice, and b) who didn't know them, and c) will now know them forever.
Let us speak clearly: They tell us why it's good for us that we use our real names, and they may be right. But they don't tell us why it's bad for them that we don't. If it's not bad for them, then why restrict user's choice? People socialize in different ways, in my opinion, a good social network would be flexible enough to allow different people socialize in a way that is most comfortable to them.
EDIT: My legal name is not "Ben Beltran". Nonetheless, almost everybody in real life and online knows me this way, few know my actual long name and most think I'm called benjamin. I believe this name attaches my statements to my person more than my legal name does. I consider this my "Real Name"
Consider how facebook never allowed too much freedom over pages, no background images or changing the font or auto playing music. These were all hotly requested features, and why should facebook care if someone put a tiled image background or had a different font? They cared because in reality people often don't make the best decisions and for anything social, other people being morons and using red comic sans over tiled lolcats causes the value of the service to decrease.
I'm not sure if the same is true about Google+, but I did think it was jarring that people named things like "Texans for Marijuana Legalization" started following me on Google+. If there was people named anything close to the average xbox handle, it would definitely make me less likely to use the service (things like vagblaster77 or dankbluntz4lyfe)
I beg to differ. I mostly use facebook to keep in touch with my extended family. Most of it is updates on our children. While that is probably of little significance to anyone outside my extended family, it is important to us.
Others though use social networks to find jobs, talk about their most recent artistic project, discuss research, and keep in touch with business contacts. And those are within my social circles. If we step further out, they have been used as a tool with major political consequences in many places.
You're very rarely interacting with no context at all, and most interactions are among friends, where you have much more information than is contained in a Facebook profile.
I think that's the entire point of the article - that those issues combine to be a factor on social networks in a way that they very rarely do offline.
To put it another way: on social networks, assuming you use your real name (which is the issue), all three of identity, verification, and permanence are true by default, and false only as exceptions. Offline, you may get one or two, but rarely all three at once.
Similarly, if I hear someone shout something that interests me, I can begin a conversation with them which may lead to getting details of their identity, unless they're actively concealing those details. Or follow them home, and so forth, as you start moving to less and less ethical options.
Attaching real names to statements online does make the process ridiculously easy, though, and it would probably be useful if social networks had a "do not expose my identity (in comments, etc.) to people who are not already my friends (or friends of friends)." That seems (to me, at least) to be rather more similar to how the real world works.
You'll even get all sorts of different angles, lighting conditions, age variations, and just about anything else you might want.
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but there's something about it that makes me at least a little uneasy.
My question is Why are we trying to emulate real life on the web? Yes, anonymous comments have no personal touch. But how about meeting up for a beer for some real conversations as opposed to writing on each other's wall ?
I didn't see any name badges in Tahrir Square.
The author's real point is that argument made by google and facebook ("there's nothing wrong with more-or-less eliminating anonymity online for the same reasons that we do just fine in meatspace without much anonymity") doesn't go through, because of the differing levels of permanence between digital and real-life interactions. Therefore, if you want to argue one side or the other, you have to do it with those differences in mind.
Its so much more complicated than that. The clearcut assumption that those who express this particular ideal are immature and inexperienced is ridiculous.
But for everyone else god forbid that you have to think twice before posting something on the Internet. I use my real name for basically everything online (save video game networks which is more just out of habit really) and I try to consciously filter myself because I know I am writing in ink.
Short of the extreme edge cases where a person is attempting to hide from someone because they fear for their life, the main argument against using real names always seems to boil down to someone waiting to share something radical and controversial but not having it tied to their physical persona.
Social networks like Facebook and Google+ are more about those close connected relationships that you would get if you lived in a small town (at least that is how I look at them) and if someone wants to spew their ideas anonymously then let them find another saloon in the wild wild west that is the Internet.
"the main argument against using real names always seems to boil down to someone waiting to share something radical and controversial but not having it tied to their physical persona."
But you seem to just take it as a given that the idea that someone may want that, or that it may be a social good to protect that, is so bizarre and far out that an argument need not even be made, it's sufficient just to state it.
Well, I disagree. People should be able to say controversial things without any fear, and I can give you two enormous use cases: Democracy, and childhood. Democracies need to be able to freely debate things that are, by definition, controversial, to function at all. Children need to be able to say stupid things without them being tagged by them for the next fifty years.
I'm pretty confident you haven't got an argument more powerful than those... and "reidmain gets annoyed when he sees things (s)he thinks are stupid on the Internet" certainly isn't it.
I see the need to be able to say something controversial and not fear reprisal. My main argument was that services like Facebook and Google+ are not geared towards that. It is a personal opinion but it is just how I see these sites being used.
Things like EA Spouse definitely need to have the ability to exist on the internet. I just don't think that this woman would need to be able to share it on her Google+ account.
In the old days you gave your friends your pseudonyms. My friends knew mine and I knew theirs. That is the way public communication should be. We don't walk around outside giving everyone we see a brochure with our full name, city of residence, and pictures of everything we've said in the past year -- we certainly shouldn't do it online where the information is as easily accessible by someone in your hometown as it is a Mexican kidnapping gang.
We don't walk around giving everyone we see a brochure of all that information because most people don't want it. Heck even your friends don't want a lot of it.
I'll give my name out to anyone who asks, my address and pictures out to those I trust.
I see the Internet as a untrusted source. I don't post my address online (although I'm sure it is available somehow i.e. yellow pages or through some government service) and all the pictures and ideas I share are targeted primarily at my friends but I realize that once it is out there I shouldn't be afraid of someone else getting their hands on it.
You said you do not post your address online, but by posting or using your real name, you are effectively posting your address also.
"At least annually, a registrar must present to the registrant the current Whois information, and remind the registrant that provision of false Whois information can be grounds for cancellation of their domain name registration. Registrants must review their Whois data, and make any corrections."
http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/wdrp.htm and whois is a 5-second task.
I'm not sure where the 'registered by a private individual' details masking services fit into it, I assume there's some provision for personal privacy, but I'm not 100% certain.
Anyone to whom I give my email address can very easily find my full name, phone number and current address. I should really check out some of those masking services.
Or if you name is so unique that there are only a few people who share it.
May I point out that those extreme edge cases, while rare, are also extremely important? That person fleeing an abusive relationship is probably far more in need of a swift effective communications medium to get social support, practical advice and even to just plain tell their story than most people are.
And you are forgetting other cases that are just a touch less extreme but still relevant. The young adult struggling with their orientation may be desperate to avoid having certain people discover this fact while equally desperate to find others in a similar situation for that support and advice.
I am the first to say that Google and Facebook are private businesses and how they handle their business is up to them, but if we are going to have a real discussion of the reprecussions of their decisions then we need to remember that these edge cases are real and they are important.
Personally, I'm not convinced that if you add up all the very valid reasons people have for wanting to be anonymous, that you have a percentage of people which could be described as "extreme edge cases."
Is the concern that Facebook and Google's decisions are going to permeate so far it will become common place or that because these two social networks are the big dogs that it is unfair (for lack of a better word) for the edges cases to not be able to participate?
Also, as I have read in other commenters, a social network is only valuable if your friends are on it, so while alternatives exist it may be hard to find the people you need to find on them.
I guess someone could see this as this real name policy then "infecting" the Internet. It would really come down to why are these sites implementing this service. If they are doing it for ease of use, so the user doesn't have to create another account, and there are no alternatives that don't require you to use your real name then that could be bad.
But if these sites also want people to use their real names because they feel it would foster a greater sense of community then that is their prerogative.
There is no one service yet that rules over the Internet and so there will always be alternatives. If a service requires you to use your real name then you can just choose not to use it.
I'd grow more concerned if governments and ISPs attempted to implement a "driver's license" for the Internet. Personally I wouldn't mind this but a lot of people obviously would.
Most of my Google+ connections are from email addresses I knew beforehand or links spewed out on Twitter. How I got a lot of these in the old days were probably through nicknames.
Everything else, I am content to slip away from the Big Search Spotlight in the sky.
I see Google as being a company that values privacy, but inherently knows a good deal more than I am comfortable with.
I have accounts on LinkedIn, G+, and StackOverflow that are strictly "professional persona", for the purpose of networking only.
2) Do you have any documented cases where using your real name had any advantage over using "reidmain"?
3) Social networks are not really a choice, trend-setters usually herd everyone else.
4) What's your name?
2) The only other pseudonym I've ever used is my gamer handle of Warmain. I would say that whenever I made a friend on a video game and we got close enough that we thought to exchange real names it forged a closer bond because it seemed to humanize you a bit more. But then again in video games there are names like xxxDragonSlayerzz. I think the pseudonyms people are complaining about using are not so dehumanizing.
4) My name is Reid. Pleasure to meet you.
Of course, Circles are Google's attempt to mirror this, although I think they do so poorly: rather than there being a mental "context shift" as in real life, posts from all your circles are mixed together, and you have to decide on a context each time you post. In practice, I share everything publicly because it's the path of least resistance; the result is not much different from Facebook.
Everyone knowing everyone has advantages and disadvantages. Obviously, out-group behaviour can be more easily identified and punished. This is useful for reducing out-group behaviour you disapprove of, e.g. crime, but bad because it discourages out-group behaviour you approve of, e.g. radical political opinions.
One example: I would love to be able to give karma scores to other drivers, and I bet insurance companies would be interested too.
Someone is eventually going to take the old "You are the average of your five best friends" adage and create a score (a set of scores, more likely) based on it. That will either be illegalized within a year or make billions. (My cynical rationale on it getting political heat is that it will be probably better than human judgment, like FICO, hit some people hard, like FICO, and strike people as "unearned", unlike the layman's understanding that FICO scores are dominated by your behavior as opposed to the behavior of other people.)
I wouldn't. This can easily be easily gamed just the way social media sites tend to be gamed.
The simple fact remains that "the internet is forever." It is more public and persistent than just about any other place imaginable. That comes with its pros and cons.
Since the advent of the internet, people are self-publishing at a rate never before experienced in the history of humanity. Everything we do today has always existed, except it was never as easy to record and disseminate, nor as cheaply to publish and store for posterity let alone broadcast it to the entire world.
Before the internet, you had to hire an autobiographer, an editor and a publisher to broadcast your minute thoughts; nowadays any bum can tell what he or she is doing, thinking, planning, rehearsing or not twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.