: If you like being called Ada-Man, use it. Just keep in mind that with a few
: notable exceptions, the major posters here - the one's who make the most
: significant contributions (all right, the older ones) tend to use their
: own name. There is a bit of a maturity factor here.
I must confess, I do not fully understand the maturity statement. I think it through and get to, "Of course, sharing one's real name in place of using a pseudonym is a mark of maturity. This is so because it... because... well..." and there I stick. I have come up with a number of ideas, none of which fit very well. They are as follows:
·There is a measure of trust which a real-name-using person places in the audience -- such as, "I trust that nobody in my audience is a crazed psycho who will seek me out and kill me for posting here" -- but this is more of a cost-benefit analysis than, I think, maturity.
·You, perhaps, achieve a greater level of intimacy with the readers of this Story Forum than I do purely by reason of using your real name; but I'm thinking this comes just from the fact that real names are already associated with certain, perhaps-intimate, things in the audience's experiences. And again, this isn't what I would term maturity.
·Perhaps you have credentials that go with your name, but the choice I made was to begin posting here with a mostly-blank slate, and again, I can't think of how this would indicate maturity.
·And if it's the issue of inventing a personality, I don't really see how using your real name is any better -- what if it's not your real name? What if you're using your real name but have an invented personality for online interaction anyway? Et cetera.
·About all I can think of is that a real life name can be cited as your own in other places on the internet like, for example, on your homepage on a university's servers. And even that can be tampered with, though I concede that the possibilities of such an involved scheme actually happening are much smaller. But really, there's no way to guard entirely against that sort of thing -- and then I run into the maturity issue again.
So there are my failed stabs at explaining the maturity factor. Now that I've talked all sorts of crazy talk, I hope that you'd like to expand on your statement and clear up my confusion.
Actually a 76-year-old woman who has used never used the Internet nor even heard of a computer in her life,
Lunair
;)
