Thursday, August 16, 2012

There is No Privacy on the Internet

I take care that my first and last name are not used in this blog in a way that would make it come up on a search.  Not that a google search of my first and last name doesn't pull up a number of things that I am only grudgingly okay with being seen by anyone who wants to know, but I try to keep at least a few levels of remove between Professional Internet Me and Blogging Internet Me.  I think. 

Except it's only recently occurred to me that all of the casual internet me's are connected, especially Blogging Internet Me and Dating Internet Me, because I use the same damn name.  I mean, adding a "the" in front of my username isn't exactly a big intellectual hurdle.

So someone viewing my profile, with curiosity, might easily end up here.  I've done it, I mean, with others.  I totally found Flicka's real name and Facebook page and stalked him for a while until I got bored.  And this is not exactly where I would want someone to go from my profile.  It's not that anything here is a secret.  But there is a certain amount of curating that one does when one is meeting new people.  One does not bring all the crazy at once.  One doles out the crazy a little at a time so it gets balanced by the awesome that is also revealed over time.  One does not send people that one is irrationally crushing on to ones blog which is all the crazy all the time because it's a dumping ground, it's what I do to make the rest of my interactions slightly more palatable.  Um, also, if one is careful, one will not switch to first person in the middle of a diatribe that one is pretending is a general stance, and not personal, not at all.

So, maybe I'm saying hello?  I am realizing that I might be saying hello, that I have been saying hello, I just didn't think about it that way.  Dear OK Cupid: hello.

(Reading this again, I remember that someone found me here, starting with my real name, and not my internet name, and maybe it's also because she knew the story I'd written and also blogged, but it might be an easier trail than I thought, because I also remembered that my flickr profile links to my official site, and also this site, so really this is all very silly of me because there is no privacy on the internet, I knew that.  But I had reasons I could use to pretend otherwise, and now, not so much.  Holy run-on sentences, Batman!)

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