Column:
Screen names are insightful
Published Dec. 9, 2008
On more than one occasion I've come across people whose screen names are simply "dad" in "Mario Kart" online. This always struck me as odd, and made me wonder just how much of your self-identity dies when you become a father. But then I had the obvious realization that these people probably didn't lose their former personality, they just changed. And now the name "dad" describes them the way "sk8rgurl" might describe their daughters.
In a lot of societies, names have explicit meanings. From American Indians to the Japanese, it's common for people's names to be words in their own language. This isn't the case in the English-speaking world, with the exception of a girl in my friend's graduating class named LilAngel Logan. But generally speaking, our names mean close to nothing.
This is what makes the Internet so interesting. Everyone has the opportunity to come up with his or her own name, and with few exceptions, people tend to just want to describe themselves. Glancing at my AIM buddy list, most people's names contain either a part of their real name, a reference to pop culture or a number relating to their birthday.
There's this notion that the Internet acts as an escape for people, that it gives people the chance to be someone who they really aren't. This assumption is employed to describe why people play games like Second Life, or why they post on discussion boards about having sex with anthropomorphic rabbits.
But when you look at the ways people behave online, this doesn't seem to be true at all. Generally, people tend to act more like their real selves on the Internet. And this is why we choose screen names that are descriptive of who we actually are.
So when people play games like "Second Life" or "World of Warcraft," the goal isn't to be somebody different, it's to be unabashedly you. Maybe someone who opted out of being a writer in real life to pursue a more profitable career will spend their time writing for a newspaper in Second Life, but it's only because that's a part of who they really are, not because they're trying to be somebody totally different.
In essence, naming yourself gives you a small chance at shaping others' perceptions, which is usually better than having your parents make that decision for you. The book "Freakonomics" touches on a family who named their sons Winner and Loser, which besides being a terrible idea, is hilarious. And as it turns out, Loser ended up being more successful than Winner (though he might have avoided a lot of undue criticism by going by "Lou").
Similarly, I have a friend whose Chinese name means "hard-working," yet she's probably one of the laziest people I know.
In general, it seems like being given a particular name doesn't have much of an effect on what type of person you become. And similarly, when people choose names for themselves, they just express who they already are.
So with that in mind, I encourage everyone to name their children in the most embarrassing ways possible. I'm going to name my daughter "Dad" and my son "Mom," just to make sure their lives are miserable. Because, after all, I'm sure that a child of mine by any other name would turn out just as worthless.