ROFL.

We were revolutionaries!

What was your first screenname? Mine, I’m almost ashamed to admit was “Daslyfox.” Ha. “Sly Fox”, get it? So why “Da”? Simple. “Da bomb.”

I know. Soooo "I'm-a-loser-1997." Because that’s what year it was that my parents first got the internet. We were surely behind the curve—I mean most of the people who resembled friends (who really is a friend in middle school?) were already online. All of them were already wearing badges stating their self-chosen aliases in attempt to draw a black line around their identity and give people a clearer idea of how they wanted to be seen. Most of these were not the typical bread and butter ones (SeanFox123), of course many of them had a youthful, creative “twist” to them. I won’t embarrass anyone; I don’t remember others’ screennames anyway.

We were all teenagers, eager to carve out a social presence on the net. I sought friends and allies by participating in AOL chatrooms and cheap-o online gaming communities back when those AOL communities were innovative, or at least virtually monopolizing the online community, and none of us had any idea how this all worked.

It occurred to me when I was noting some friend’s screennames that if I were 40 and instant messaging with a young associate in my company across gChat or AIM after friending them on Facebook (I’m a hip and “with-it” executive), their (our) screennames would strike me as infantile. And yet, to me, their friend, they’re nothing. These images are only digital doppelgangers or glances of the people I know and love from a time in their lives I didn’t know them—when they picked their last screenname.

Now we can “safely” use our real names on Facebook or gChat; maybe we’re too grown-up to want those fronts up anymore in any case—too grown-up to want people to think we’re interesting or cool based on a carefully chosen array of letters and digits. We haven’t totally given up yet; we are still attempting clever e-mail identities, blog titles or MySpace “names” (sorry, I hate MySpace, I have no idea what it’s actually called when you can pick a clever alias).

Do these levels of self, or more accurately, these public identifications have precedent? To my knowledge, only with pennames by great authors and fake IDs and passports. Nicknames don’t count, after all. Nicknames come from friends and social circumstances. We’ve named ourselves. And whether my friends have felt that I have been accurately portrayed by anyone of my hundreds of assumed names, or even by my current screenname, DJSharpie27 (the only one I currently have that I have that is truly disingenuous)* is not important. It was our foray, our invention, and our mysterious mutual attraction to this duality that generated the excitement and interest that led our technology to where it is. Despite it all, I don’t care what Bill, Larry, or Sergey or Mark say. We built Web 2.0.

LOL!

*For those who are interested, I want to be a DJ, I love Sharpies, and since the screenname was taken, I used 27, a number I’ve always fancied for some relatively unremembered reason. I think it was a fortune cookie from the China Garden in my hometown during a dinner celebrating the completion of the Homecoming float…one of the best times of my life. I think that’s where it came from anyway.