When the Anonymous require Anonymity.

I've been mulling this idea over in my brain for a bit. Such things do not often end in cohesive thought or crystallized philosophy, but vague inklings are still reference points for further inquiry.

The start point for our journey is real life, or "First Life" if you're a fan of having a Second Life. (Prime Life and Life'?) Most people have two selves that reconcile into a whole - the "public" life, the life that greets your neighbors, pays your taxes, helps your landlady take out her garbage. In public life, you are Thomas A. Anderson... okay, enough with the Agent Smith routine. Anyway, public life is the life that you present to most people and that most people see you under. Then there's the "private" life, one that explores what happens when the doors close, the windowshades are drawn, and there's nobody else around to see. Well, sort of - the "private" life is really the life of the person that is told to the trusted inner circle, who get something much closer to accurate accounts of what's happened. The truly private life is what happens when there's nobody to see and there's nobody who gets told. (I think this applies both to single persons and to couples, though.) There are probably very few truly private things in our lives - although they probably affect us tremendously.

At first pass, this idea seems to be a reasonable thing. Most people do not want to be regaled with the intimate details of the lives of everyone around them. And most people do not want to tell all peoples they meet about the intimate details of their lives. There are people who take advantage of such things. So by restricting the public group and creating the "private" group, those things that are intimate but need or want to be told are still released. A group of women will discuss their sex lives, (a very important discussion, actually), but some of those women will not discuss their sex lives with their partner, much less any of their partner's friends (assuming they're not part of the trust circle).

With this idea in mind, we jump to the Internet, where unless there are deliberate actions taken by a person (or by a person seeking someone else), a user handle is relatively free of associations and identities. Everyone starts on the 'net as a complete enigma. Most of us dispel parts of that enigma, so much so that a personality coalesces around a particular user handle. It can be a true reflection of the person typing, or a distortion or reversal. In all cases, judgment can only be made of the username (unless identifying fragments are attached to it, by someone seeking out validation of claims and trying to match a name and other characteristics to a username. Remember, we all could be liars when we're talking about ourselves.) It's not even necessarily true there's a human behind the keyboard - bots will get better to the point where you really have to think hard and ask specific questions to determine whether or not one is talking to a Replicant. The Internet affords all of us anonymity, which we exercise to greater or lesser degrees.

What I then find fascinating is the creation of things like "sex journals" or alternate usernames or the usage of private filtering groups. It is, in essence, creating the "private" grouping of the public username. Second Life is being split in two just like regular life. The anonymous require anonymity, because the personae they've created or used on the Internet don't talk about those things, and to do so would be a bit of a character break, or so it may seem. There are some people like greyweirdo who have no trouble talking publicly about things that most people would consider to be "private" matters. There's not any details about nookie, necessarily, but just saying that one is poly, bi, gay, lesbian, or enjoys one (or more) of a significant number of fetishes is enough to get people saying "TMI!", "Perverts", or "There are children around!" For some, even discussing menstruation is going too far for a public post. Others might think that having a coherent political thought expressed on paper is sufficient grounds for lj-cut or other filtering mechanisms.

Did this happen because as in real life, there are usernames that will look for something specific and then zealously attack it or make comment on it, trying to make it a weakness or an embarrasment or somehow the defining characteristic of a username? (Something Awful, your reputation precedes you in this regard.) I can see examples where people retreat to a different name or change theirs because prime life intruded in a very bad way, threatening harm or death in the physical. In other cases, maybe the harassment gets to be too taxing to deal with, and a username slips away. Those are not the things I'm interested in. I'm interested in stable usernames that, for one reason or another, have a filtered "private" group or another username that they describe their "private" life in. In an environment that you can maintain significant anonymity in with almost no effort, and then better anonymity with some effort, why do people still lock things into a "private" domain, or disassociate the public name with the "private" one, even though there's not necessarily any reason to do so?

I've rambled enough on this, clumsily and clod-footedly, so now I'm passing it off to the rest of you, who are far more agile and experienced at this than I am. There's no need to personally identify, if you don't want to - speak in general terms or anonymously - after all, that's what this particular kind of question is meant for.