Sarah Caudwell (pseudonym of Sarah Cockburn, 1939-2000) was a British barrister and writer of detective stories. Sadly, she only finished four novels before her untimely death. Reviews of her work uniformly use words such as witty, delightful, clever, diverting, etc. I happened to be rereading her first (“Thus was Adonis Murdered”) while writing last week’s newsletters and was struck by a good analogy for the “Real Names” (see “Google+: antisocial networking?“) issue.
ANALYSIS: Is there a lesson for Google+ in the demise of Baidu Talk?
In the story the protagonist, Julia Larwood (a young, somewhat unworldly, tax attorney), takes a vacation to Venice with a group tour or Art Lovers (it’s actually called the Art Lovers tour). She is a sexually forthright woman who hopes for some erotic adventures on her trip. It is clear that she is not looking for romance, but instead wants sex. After meeting the rest of the tour group she sets her sights on Ned (always mentioned with an adjective — the ethereal Ned, the ravishing Ned, etc.). After working her feminine wiles for a few days she does end up spending an afternoon in dalliance with the delightful Ned.
Later that evening a dead body is discovered (in Ned’s bed) and the police ask Julia about her relationship to Edward Watson, who has been identified as the deceased. Julia claims never to have heard of him (although half the hotel knows where she was that afternoon), but, as she writes to a friend: “‘If you,’ said Julia, ‘had recently shared a bed with a young man of ethereal beauty, would it occur to you that his surname was Watson?'”
As far as we are aware, only two of the members of the Art Lovers tour knew that Ned was legally yclept Edward Watson (the tour director and the man traveling with Ned); all the others knew him only as Ned.
When friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances come to a social network they will only identify me if I’m sporting the name they associate with me. They may not even know my legal name, or the one I’ve chosen as my “Real Name.”
The idea of the name is so that we may associate activities and attribute them to the same person as well as identify that person as someone we know in a different context. There are contexts where it’s important to use your full legal name (such as financial transactions), but social networking isn’t one of them.
Of course you could always chose to follow the path that my colleague Joerg Resch followed when recently joining Google+ — he chose the Real Name Hans Müller!
