The real name artificial reality bubble

[firecat]

Kee Hinckley on Google+ (public, so visible to people who aren't members) discusses the real difference between social networks where real names are required and those where names are up to the individuals.

https://plus.google.com/117903011098040166012/posts/Ax8tyxVMa5w

Excerpt (emphasis mine):

When you create a social networking site that requires real names, you create an artificial bubble. What you see is just the nice things in people's lives, you don't see what's really happening. But when people have control over who knows their name, they still talk about cute cats and the latest iPhone and what kind of wine they drank last night, but they also talk about other things. They talk about dealing with their parent's Alzheimer's. They talk about how their daughter was missing for three days and got drugged and raped and the police refused to follow up. They talk about how they just lost their job and they're worried that they'll end up on the street. They talk about how their boss will fire them if he finds out they're gay. They talk about how they were sexually abused as a kid. They talk about what it's like to live in a country where bloggers get thrown in prison. People don't dare talk about those things with their birth names; not when Google is indexing everything they say.
...
The sad thing is, if you're dealing with something difficult in your life, that bubble also makes you think you're alone. You think you're the only one, because nobody else is talking about how they're going to pay for their parents nursing care, or how hard it is to juggle work and family.

This is quite true in my experience. I see a lot more of people's real lives on DW and LJ than on Facebook.

A commenter on the original post disagreed and said that it's fine for you to not use your real name on G+, you just have to use an ordinary sounding name, not what he called a "fantasy name." This isn't true as far as I can ascertain, but it makes me want to play a game with G+ where thousands of us all join under the same ordinary sounding name ("John Smith," if we use the typical ordinary sounding name of my culture).

Comments

[oursin]

When you create a social networking site that requires real names, you create an artificial bubble. What you see is just the nice things in people's lives, you don't see what's really happening.

This was a thought that occurred to me when there was a newspaper article recently about adolescents becoming depressed and even suicidal when they saw all their friends apparently having a good time via Facebook. Because there's a certain sundial effect of only counting sunny hours.

[sofiaviolet]

Yes, I can definitely understand that. Makes me grateful that I went through teenagerdom (wherein I was... frequently suicidal, shall we say, and I knew I wasn't alone) before teens had migrated to platforms like Facebook.

[cleverthylacine]

The other thing I liked about LJ and still like about DW now was that while your age was in your profile, people didn't always look, and you weren't sorted toward people by age or workplace/school, you had interests searches for finding friends. So I could get into a new fandom or ship or thing and find other people who liked it.

I always thought that was a good thing for teens, because you and a bunch of other teens were LJ-friends with me and a bunch of other older people with shared interests when you were a teen.

And so there you were, being troubled, for want of a better word. But not only were there other people your age in your circle who had troubles, there were people like me and my older friends in your circles, and we not only had troubles, but had figured out some ways to cope with them, and were out of our parents' houses and on our own and we didn't have to tell you that "It Gets Better" because you could SEE that even though I was still depressed and still had trouble dealing with certain kinds of authorities and all that, I was out on my own and over 30 and still alive and glad I hadn't killed myself when I was 15. I don't know if that was a big thing for you personally, but I know it was a big thing for some of the other teenagers I was friends with; we talked about it. I talked a lot with the people who were teens and active in LW about stuff like this.

(Although I had to deal with a certain amount of envy for people who got to be teenagers in a world with GSAs and anti-bullying initiatives and better brain drugs and shrinks, LOL @ me.)

I had a circle on LJ, and have one here, that has a lot of people older and younger than me on it, and one of the benefits of that for me is the ability to see problems coming and know they can be coped with. You and Niki and Flourish and Verity all had friends in college and friends in the working world when you were teens; I had friends who lost their folks, or who had to deal with harassment of various kinds in the workplace, before I did, and so I too got the benefit of knowing those things can be coped with, even though it's hard, and that it still keeps on Getting Better.

I'm not a teenager, but Facebook is really annoying to me that way at 47, and at 15 I think I'd have wanted to shoot things since I pretty much already did.

Although it is hilarious the part where the boy I wanted to run off with and marry when I was 17 is now a huge Farmville addict who does nothing on FB but annoy me; I suspect our parents did us a favour there...

[sofiaviolet]

Yes. I mean, in the moment, I was just happy to get a bunch of *hugs* whenever I posted about how much everything sucked, but with a few years' perspective, all the *hugs* in the world from other teenagers wouldn't have been worth nearly so much as a couple of *hugs* from people I admired, liked and/or respected on the basis of what they said when they weren't being my support network.

I think that ability to find "people like me" in categories other than the societally conditioned/approved/enabled groupings like age, location, school/workplace etc. is what makes socializing on the internet valuable. Things like Facebook - sites that assume those offline groups are the only valid ways of doing it - strike me as dull and constrained. They lack the the scifi-ish optimism of making new connections with new people because of shared interests rather than enforced proximity.