The aesthetics of names

[firecat]

This is a post by Mike Elgan on G+ titled "The trouble with Google's names policies: Real unconventional names = Bad. Fake 'normal' names = OK."

https://plus.google.com/113117251731252114390/posts/XtkGjGsBA3V

The post itself is not what I want to talk about though. It's a comment in that thread by Robert Scoble, a big Google+ booster who has recently been going back and forth about what he thinks of Google's name policy.

...some people have "non common" names and I do have empathy for those who really have weird names, like M3 (if that's really his legal name).

But that said I am totally groking the AESTHETIC that Google is going for. They are trying to look different than Twitter is and I really really like seeing names that look common here. IE, most everyone I've met in the real world has a first and last name.

I can scarcely put into words the rage I feel about the notion that people's names are an "aesthetic" issue reasonably subject to control. It's racist, sexist, classist, xenophobic, and just about every other -ist and -phobic I can think of.

If Scoble were to say "I want to use my name, and I don't want to feel pressured to come up with a handle," I would understand it. He says he doesn't like Second Life because he wanted to use his name there, and I also don't like Second Life's policy of requiring you to use a name they pick for you (you get to enter your own "first name" but you have to choose from their list of "last names"). But to think that "I really like seeing names that look common" is a good basis for a policy? Or to even think that it's worth uttering in public? I don't get it.

Comments

Re: UPDATE

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Very interesting! The one you mention that seems relevant here is the same legal name as a grandparent, although I assume that the family has different names if they're both living--no?--but/and both would still qualify as Google+ names.

If the ruling required three names, I would have seen that as classist. And if any specific names were allowed or disallowed, yeah, boy howdy!

Re: UPDATE

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

They would both qualify as Google+ names, but it would be confusing. There are sufficient men in my family called "Robert Hughes", for instance, that really only birth family members can keep the nicknames straight. My husband outright gave up trying to learn them when he realised that "Old Robert" is younger than "Young Robert" - and that was when he had them in the same room. On a social media site, with small avatars, even birth family would struggle. You'd really want to be able to choose a handle that didn't feature the word "Robert" at all, without having to pretend it was your legal name.

The issue of people who for cultural or other reasons have only one legal name also has a class dimension, I believe, since in India this practice is vastly more common in certain castes than in others (or so I was told by an Indian client).

Another relevant issue may be that the English upper class had a long tradition of making servants with "strange" names adopt a more "respectable" name, so being able to control the name by which one is known - and in particular the ability to choose a name that doesn't conform to the mainstream aesthetic - probably is culturally more of an issue for the working class here than it is for the upper and middle classes.