Remember when the only way you could get a word to your girlfriend at college was to write a letter on paper? Remember where you were when the term "instant message" came into daily use? How about the first time you fired up IRC or Yahoo! chat? It's been an amazing couple of decades. Suddenly the world is a lot smaller. With the newfangled internet demanding our attention through email, chat, cell phones and sciforums.com, our online persona is constantly in demand as well. Enter the handle. The Science of the Handle Webster's third definition of handle is actually a: title 8 b : name; also : nickname. With handle so defined, I'd like to elaborate a moment with a manufactured scenario. Enter Joe Internet. His first introduction to this wonder of phone lines and protocols is primarily anonymous. Indeed, you can surf from here to Google.com without a squeak of personal information or value lost. I can peruse the net for hours and download movies, images, documents and programs without so much as a hello how are you. To be sure, part of the internet is handshakes and identification, and though my computer may be a regular at Yahoo.com, my name, my personality, my life certainly isn't. Then introduce Joe Internet to the chatroom. To the message board, even. Suddenly the Internet, this wonder of anonymity, is calling for a name, a face, a person. At first Joe may be giddy enough to enter his own information. But usually we balk at introducing ourselves to the world that is the internet, for surely it is possible for any man within reach of a computer to read these very words - to know me past my anonymous mouse clicks and secure web purchases. That's about when Joe Internet imagines a handle - that name he trusts with all his hopes, dreams, and fears. It's that warm fuzzy cloak they drape themselves in when walking the dangerous and sometimes rainy streets of the information highway. The handle is therefore universal, being that extra puff of protection the human psyche desires . . . especially at the realization of such a wild and fantastical dream as the internet. Propose it to Chief Joseph, Ben Franklin, or Einstein a place in your house where you could sit down and be connected from the Netherlands to Nova Scotia in the blink of an eye (or 10 blinks on a 56k). What does this result in? We have a fascinating live example of this science right here before us at sciforums.com. Do I really need to illustrate? There are some prodigious characters here. Take Sir Loone. Look past, for a moment, his frequent and often ineffective references to the Bible. His bold and unashamed statement of values, beliefs, and the damnation of souls who don't live them. Who can he be, really? What face, what soul are you imagining sits at his keyboard, points to sciforums and starts attacking the naysayers of God? Can you imagine it? It seems difficult. And why the name Sir Loone? Do you doubt for a moment the potential that Sir Loone could be anything from a 15 year-old girl in Macon, Georgia, to a 35 year-old minister in the deserts of Utah? Do you doubt it? Andrew Brown wrote once, Whoever and wherever Sir Loone is or claims to be, his online persona is different from his person. It takes some practice, some patience, and some courage to make your online soul as similar and sensitive as your real-world soul. And even then, we sigh comfortably in the breathing room a handle affords - after all, when I type an instant message, when I post a thread, I'm not giving away anything except this handle, and it doesn't mean anything to you. I'm safe. *whew* Even if tassia or Godless or Tony1 were to descend upon my subject and wreck it to pieces, I could conceivably shut down my computer, walk out the door, and sit on the grass watching the moon rise. I would be okay. The Effects of the Handle What does this mean? To whatever varying degree you employ your online persona to fetch information, to post epic debates, to argue and flirt in a chatroom, do we lose a little of ourselves? At what point do we desire a mouse in our hand over the hand of a real person? At what point does the hum of our processor fan become that much more soothing than the buzz of conversation at the party down the street? We're giving away a lot less at the feet of our tower case. This may have been impacted by indications that the people who surf the longest are those introverted individuals who talked rarely in high school and distanced themselves from others. But that argument, surely, loses its validity in the wake of this explosion in internet use and phenomena by the masses. Here at www.sciforums.com you may stumble upon real people who aren't the least bit afraid of posting their hearts and minds to the message boards of the world. But there are some who seem a little too outrageous, or who seem to possess a single human emotion, an extreme and odd affinity for expressing it at every opportunity. That may just be a real person employing a safe and imagined persona. What are we losing? What are we gaining? What are your thoughts? Why do we hide behind handles? And those of use who don't, what makes you step out of the shadow and be real without any fear?
I'm sorry, I had to laugh BigBlueHead. Good point. And you know of course, I'm not quite as Soupy as the world thinks I am either. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
im not remotly as evil or sychotic as id make you think. however i wouldnt go so far to say this is a persona i use only online, because i try quite hard to make people i know in person think of me as this deranged spychopathic survant to evil. so just to clear a few things up.... i HAVE indeed actualy fired an rpg and grenade launcher. i bought them for 60$ a piece from my friend, Dex. that whole thing about killing my hamster, my sisters dog, my brothers cat, and fluffy... all true. exept i didnt actualy do in the dog. i left him to die on his own. im not actualy a chlepto because i have to steal things consiusly. my mom still refers to me as "my sick masochist" and that makes me mad. my parents caught me making hydragen gass out of bathroom cleaners, i said it was for an experiment, but they were too smart and i got grounded for a month. while i was grounded they found a case of black powder and a bottle of magnisium and sulfides in my room. i try very hard to act like a tough and sociapathic freak when im realy a big marshmellow inside. im terribly sensitive and just try to hide it by pretending to be a homicidale sociapath. but im sure you can all tell that. i also feel that i cry way too much. im such a cry baby, its pathetic. im realy alot more normal than i let people think, but its not just all your anonymous netizens that i set up this persona for, i do it to everyone. besides, whats wrong with setting up a persona for yourself? if thats realy how you want to be, wich it probably is seeing as you try so hard to act the part youve chosen, then acting it out online can perhaps even help you become more like that ideal persona in real life.
There are other reasons for anonymity. I loved Fraggle Rock but I was not a member of the generation it was aimed at. My wife and I were in our 40s at the time and we're now old enough to be grandparents to most of you. Besides, the character I really identified with was Junior Gorg. I can't identify myself on most BBSs that deal with anything controversial because of my job. It's one of those things where my employer thinks I "represent" them everywhere I go. They don't follow me around and listen to what I say (this isn't the CIA) but they do notice what their employees write in letters to the editor and on BBSs if somebody happens to notice it. So to avoid having to censor myself and still keep my job I remain anonymous. But the few details I've given you about my life are true and I hope you feel you know me well enough to decide whether or not to listen to me.
Soupir: The "real world" you is a sham. Your folly is thinking the real world gets anything other than a shell. Out there what you really think is curbed by social confines, leaving you empty, and everything you say is cut down by emotion: You cut thoughts You cut words You cut actions You cut reactions all because there's that factor of actually caring about what those close think of you. If you showed them your soul, they'd hate you, and its harder to swallow it becuase its bitter when you actually care that they do. Its not like I wouldn't know- baring my soul has made enemies. Here, you're as real as the nose on my face. Why? Because you don't give a shit what I think of you. So you're wrong. What really needs practice is how to make your real life 'you' as real as your handle and not fear it.
Re: There are other reasons for anonymity. It is sad that an employer can force anonymity on a person. I too could have gotten into trouble because a forum owner send a complaint to my employer. Fortunately the forum owner did not really understand the power distribution in a research institute, and the fact that certain people do not have the time to open up every email and bother to look it through. And that my employer is not my employer. And that the computer administrator is a decent guy. And that we are not in the US, etc. I can't really be anonymous anymore though. It is a shame sometimes, but I am not very bothered by it anymore. If anything I am worse in real life than as spuriousmonkey.
My name is me. I am the same pain in the arse in real life as I am on herePlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!... However I am not a bell and neither do I toll. But bel is part of my real name. And BigBlueHead Here I thought you were papa smurfPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!... lol Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I spend all my time on sciforums talking about moral relativism and now I'm Papa Smurf? Damn... I guess on the show there was that one lady who wanted to catch the smurfs so that she could rub them on her face to make herself look younger. I think that was the only show I ever saw where the villain wanted to catch the protagonists and rub them on her face.
I am not any different in real life than I am on message boards. I like to joke around, but I don't pretend to be brilliant, wealthy, etc. I chose the handle "Galt" because I can agree with the themes of individuality and individual rights of Atlas Shrugged. This, of course, is not a nickname I go by in real life, as most of my closest friends are computer geeks and car nuts who have never read Atlas Shrugged and may never have even heard of it. Even if they had, I probably wouldn't want to be called by that name anyway. I have only ever had one nickname in real life: Boomer, which was given to me by college golfing buddies, due to my ability to drive the ball really far (though not always completely in the right direction). At the moment I am considering changing my user name here on SciForums, and one possible choice is the name for the online gallery I am planning on creating for some of my art work. The name would be based on various interests of mine (and also happens to be the name of a song that I like), and would probably be halfway decent advertising as well.
i think most of my handles are representative of me in ways my name is not. other people gave me my name, i give me handles.
Galt... whenever I read your name I think of the toy company, if that helps. http://www.galttoys.com/
"light" pretty much killed "diet". Handles can be tested to see which pulls the most positive, friendly responses. Why not?
