Not Playing the "Real Name" Game

Facebook’s policy of users having to identify with their ‘real name’ has made the company stand out from others since the beginning. COO Sheryl Sandburg claims "You can't be on Facebook without being your authentic self" (McNeill, 2012). That seems kind of reassuring, with the amount we worry about real vs. virtual, as I mentioned last week. Yet some people have a big problem with this policy, especially LGBTQ and racial minorities. The reason is that the name on your birth certificate might not be your cultural one, or the identity you have at work (Wikipedia, 2016). Some need a different name for safety. This exposes a wider flaw in Facebook’s humanistic ideology of identity.

In our lecture this week, identity was defined as a story you tell about what happened to your body over time (Kuttainen, 2016). Imagine telling a funny story about a high school party to your friends. You might exaggerate it and laugh together over your stupidity. But how did you tell it to your parents back then? I’m guessing you excluded a few details! If you tell it to your children, it becomes a morality tale about the dangers of drinking. None of these narratives is ‘truer’ than another. The story and your attached role and identity simply changed for different contexts and over time. This is natural.

A graphic of the digital "networked self"
(The Student Affairs Collaborative)

Facebook expects you to have one identity, the same for all your “friends” on the site. But surely having to present the same sanitised picture of your life to everyone makes you less authentic, not more. Your identity is also not created by just you. You can be tagged, get comments on your pictures, and be reminded to post how long you’ve been friends. These all change your Facebook identity.

Far from helping you be your “authentic self”, Facebook makes you become a “networked self”- a cyborg identity made partly from you, the technology and other users' input (McNeill, 2012).

Bibliography

Drake, N. (2015, June 19). Help, I’m Trapped in Facebook’s Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory. Retrieved from Wired: http://www.wired.com/2015/06/facebook-real-name-policy-problems/

Kuttainen, V. (2016). Week 6: Networked Narratives. BA1001: Our Space: Networks, Narratives and the Making of Place. Townsville. Retrieved from Week 6: Networked Narratives: https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au

McNeill, L. (2012). There Is No "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography. In P. M. Database, Biography 35 (1) (pp. 65-82). University of Hawai'i Press.

Wikipedia. (2016, August 12). Facebook real-name policy controversy. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_controversy

The Student Affairs Collaborative. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://feeds.feedblitz.com/thesabloggers