Conflation of Real Life and Online Identities

Some people online are very open about their real life identity, whereas others take rather extreme precautions to avoid theirs from being leaked. Many people have very understandable and obvious reasons, and are in fact unable to take any other approach, like the famous politician or CEO whose online activity will likely be found out anyway unless they are deliberately very secretive, so they might as well use their online presence to market themselves, or alternatively the forum owner, software cracker, or black hat hacker who will be vulnerable to real life threats if they let their online identity be known. Hopefully it should be obvious to you that I am none of these things, maybe. Most people take an approach which falls somewhere in the all-public approach, openly publicising your real life identity for the sake of attention, and the all-private approach, taking steps to separate your online identities from your real one(s), using different names on different sites, becoming untraceable, etc.

I had a dilemma on how far I should take online privacy. In theory, I can place myself in the centre of the scale. I don't particularly want my online identity to be directly associated with my real one, and it would probably cause some problems if it was, but I also want to become reasonably well known and respected online, so I can freely talk to people without becoming another "anonymous" with a fluid IP address. However, if I want to maintain a consistent online identity, have public and private conversations with people, and write articles or record videos, I have to give away certain bits of personal information, sometimes at random, which get attached to that online identity. The top-level information is personal, but not particularly identifying. When I say I'm a 16-18 year old in the United Kingdom, it's no big deal, because there are millions of other people who satisfy those qualities. I suppose you could argue that 99% clearly don't match my typing style, and wouldn't have a website, but without really knowing me personally in real life, you'll never be able to tell who I am. This kind of information is what I've been comfortable sharing online for the past couple years, but it makes it difficult to talk to people or to write about anything. I can't exactly write about what I've been up to or what I'm interested me without revealing that information, and narrowing my real life identity down a fifth of the possibilities there were before. This put me in a paralysis, where I knew that if I opened up too much online, someone who knew who I was in real life would be able to tell it was me, and that person would be able to make the connection between my real life and online identity known to the whole world, making the entire exercise in taking the "middle ground" between all-public and all-private a futile effort. Part of me has begun to realise that if I want to make a website, or to make a proper online identity at all, I will have to let go of some of that desire to keep my real life and online identities disconnected. I don't exactly need to be shouting out from the rooftops my full legal name and address, but I want to be more comfortable sharing little bits of identifying information about myself.

While researching university, I searched around online for experiences of people taking the course I wanted to take. I'm sure I could have found people and their stories on Instagram, but I don't have Instagram, and I'd rather have a whole picture of one person's experience than bits and pieces from several different peoples' photos and "reels". The main two universities I was interested in were the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, so in theory, there should probably be quite a lot of people with websites possibly preaching about how great they are, which would actually be welcomed in this case, and what their time at university has been like. I was interested in the academic focus, the social focus, and the just living focus, as someone who is naturally inexperienced in all three, but to my dismay, I found nowt. One problem might be that the top of the search page is dominated by SEO-maxxed websites, from the universities themselves, but also online newspapers and boring informational sites. My search wasn't completely in vain. I tried using Marginalia Search, and found this satirical article about a Cambridge student burning their money in front of a tramp. I also found this website on how to meet people in Cambridge, which would've been very useful if I was applying for 2010 entry. Link rot is so sad! I've just gone down a rabbit hole on cam.misc and the old Usenet group(s) at Cambridge, how fun, but also distracting! You can clearly see that there isn't very much in the way of contemporary personal websites belonging to people from these universities; you can look for yourself if you don't believe me.

I think it might be an idea to make the kind of website that I wanted to find, which is really just a slice of life, with random musings and sometimes a side of gravitas. I do intend to include other things, but chronicling my life public may be a worthwhile endeavour. And there's the key word again, "public". If I want to do what I want to do on my website, I'm going to have to disclose a lot more personal information than I historically would've been comfortable sharing. If I never get to a point in life where people realise my online and real self are the same, I would be quite disappointed, perhaps narcissistically. Disclosing my university, still not yet fully determined, and my course will narrow me down to maybe 200 or 300 individuals. By this point, I will still not be immediately identifiable, but the difference compared to disclosing age and country is that if someone who knows my real identity stumbles upon my online identity, they'll probably connect the dots, and I've resigned myself to be okay with that.

I keep a private "diary / journal" which I write to every day. Some topics I have on my mind will not be appropriate for my public-facing website, for privacy reasons or otherwise, and will go there instead, alongside random mumblings about my daily life and experiences. This isn't about obscuring literally who I am, in real life, but about hiding details of my identity. It's a different problem, but still ties into deciding just how much I want to share online.