Qotw5: What's in a Name?

"What's in a name?
That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

(William Shakespeare)

The quote taken from Shakespeare’s well known play Romeo & Juliet probably will not sit in well with online pseudonyms. Pseudonymity is simply anonymity that hides a person behind an online persona via a username. Many internet users have a number of different identities they use online, to allow them to explore different aspects of their persona, interests or hobbies. But pseudonymity is also the key to membership systems as well, as it allows members of the community to learn to identify other members they like or dislike based upon their behaviors and personality. Pseudononymous systems strike a balance between people’s needs to obscure their identities online, while still allowing them to build reputations in those usernames. These systems have been shown to work very well for an online community.

People build reputations in their usernames and so their reputation becomes something they value and want to protect. Members who have an investment in something within your community are far less likely to blow that investment through inappropriate, negative behavior.
A reputation is really the collection of tags that are assigned to an individual or entity to reflect their status within a specific social network. Given that individuals play different roles in social networks; they can serve variously as connectors, gatekeepers, truth-tellers and enforcers. Reputations are tied to roles within social networks. Even in online communities, reputation tags are the motivator and governor of behaviors. People take seriously the reputation scores of an eBay seller/buyer, the accumulated scores of a player of online games, or the number of friends and ratings one has in the online social networks of Linkedin, Orkut, Friendster, Facebook or My Space. (Clippinger 2005)

An account I own under MySpace is mainly used to access music sites. In a nutshell, MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. (“Wikipedia, 2007”)


As you can see here, this is my account under MySpace. I use my real name and not other any moniker created as I feel old friends who stumble across my profile will be able to identify by my actual name. Although there is an option to make my account private, I choose against it. Therefore my full profile is assessable to whomever in MySpace. This means my pictures, my introduction, my music tastes, my top 12 friends are etc. It is very easy to size me up simply by spending a mere 5 minutes browsing through my profile. I do not add any fancy codes to my page to spice up the look of my account so understandably, traffic to my account is relatively moderate. This can be easily monitored by checking the numbers on my profile views.

Reputation garnered from this account is easily established by my interaction within the community. For instance, when I add a music band’s page into my list or when I comment to my friends accounts or pictures. I build up a reputation by choosing carefully what I wish to present myself to the online community. There have numerous incidents when I do know of friends who have their profiles completely ripped off. The term coined for this is Fakesters accounts. The rate this happens just goes to show how easy identity theft can occur online. Fortunately, I have never undergone a stolen identity before. Perhaps my profile just may not be that interesting to steal from.



In a bid to jazz up my profile, I carried out a mini experiment by simply changing my name to a pseudonym instead. I chose ‘scarlet’ as I use that moniker when tagging on friends blogs or in MSN. I kept everything else the same, from my default picture to my ‘About Me’ section. Upon logging in the following day, I found my profile views shot up to 820 from a lowly 322 the previous night. Friend requests and new messages were awaiting me in my inbox as well. It was amazing how a pseudonym like ‘scarlet’ could be so powerful to evoke attention from the MySpace community in 24 hours.

New ways of establishing and of hiding identity are evolving in the virtual world. It is a world that has evolved an intricate system of signals and behaviors that aid in establishing identity and in controlling identity deception. (Donath 1996) The more attractive an identity is presented, the more likely are its chances to get stolen and reproduced completely. Back to Shakespeares quote I used in the beginning, “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Apparently in my case, ‘scarlet’ smells a whole lot sweeter then my real name which is ironic since ‘Raihana’ actually means sweet fragrance.


References:

Donath, J.S. (1996) Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. Retrieved on February 22, 2007 from < http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html>

Clippinger, J. (2005). Identity, Reputation and Social Currency. Retrieved on February 22, 2007 from <http://onthecommons.org/node/723>

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (2007) Retrieved on February 22, 2007 from < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace>