RE: RE: outgrowing your name (online) by byzxor, by brandon
*written in response to byzxor and Brandon 🤝**
Context collapse refers to the way social media flattens our social networks; instead of shifting between multiple audiences, relationships, and performances, social media collapses everything into a flat feed, displayed on a flat profile, a “single performance space” (boyd, pg. 15).
Social media delivers content to all of these audiences indiscriminately, despite those audiences understanding and interpreting it differently, and having more or less access to related information.
The context in which you typically socialize has collapsed.
Time collapse is a theoretical extension of context collapse which posits that social media blurs the boundaries between past and present, flattening our identities and performances across time into a nonlinear lifelog of posts.
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A lifelog can help you (001) know yourself through time, but our online presence is often (002) branded, and do we (004) own it anyway?
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byzxor and Brandon both describe their experiences of creating and outgrowing their online monikers. (And don’t worry, byzxor, I have at least one friend of similar demographics who had “phat man” in their username.)
I envy them! It’s a good example of the chasm I feel within the millennial cohort, with just a handful of years making a dramatic difference in our experiences of growing up alongside the web.
When I was making my first usernames, I was too young to consider the benefit of anonymity – and as a kid who took most everything at face value, if you’re asking for the name this user goes by, that’s what I was going to give you. And by the time I understood the web better, it felt awkward and forced to do anything else, as if the audience saw me every time I tried to sneak behind the curtain.
That’s not to say that I’ve consistently gone by first name + last name my entire time online, but that has been the case for almost every account I’ve created since my second email address. The only real exception is Reddit. I eventually stopped using my name on Tumblr and started using variations of lyrics from Third Eye Blind’s Crystal Baller, lol.
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People get excited when they learn that my primary email address is firstlast@gmail.
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Like byzxor and Brandon, I eventually outgrew this as an online identifier – my own name.
In their paper on time collapse, Bradntzaeg and Lüders focus on the way we manage our identities and performance on social media. We know that our content is available – and searchable – indefinitely, and for many of us it’s attached to our real names; this makes us behave, interact, post differently on social media than we might otherwise.
More interesting to me is their conclusion that time collapse “impairs the sense of linear time”.
Going by my legal name online meant that every social group (family, colleagues, acquaintances, friends-of-friends, enemies) were crammed into the same performance space: context collapse. These groups became more crowded over the years; ephemeral connections stayed sharp, my shared context with a person continued to linger.
It’s like my online presence became more dense. There was no cycle or seasonality to my connections; they were all consistently, persistently, there, *all of the time.
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I briefly collaborated with a woman on a school project as a teenager. I was enamored with her – she was kind, philanthropic, stylish. Poised. This should have been a fleeting relationship; we never spoke after the project was completed – I can hardly remember what the project was about, or how I got in touch with her to begin with. But we became friends on social media. And so I saw as her hair transitioned to a stunning gray, I saw her announce the birth of her son and I saw him start school, I’ve seen them travel the world together.
I’m not sure I ever would have thought about her again, but now she exists in a weird area of my memory – I know nothing about this woman except some of the most important moments of her life.
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And that’s the whole thing with social media, isn’t it? Automating the assurance that someone will think about you again?
Maybe that was the subconscious motivation behind using my legal name: wanting people to remember me, specifically as I am or was or was capable of performing.
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I get the sense that we outgrow our names because they start to contain too much of us.
Maybe a name is bloated with history; maybe a name contains a general excess of youness. Maybe a name is too full of your shamelessness and, in retrospect, it feels too uninhibited, too cringe. Maybe, too, the youness spills over, displaced by the themness.
In any case, there isn’t room for the you outside of the name – the you that is trying to contain itself, to write themselves into being, to find space in a name that is gorged on data and networks and patterns.
It feels like the name itself becomes dense.