internet pseudonimity, or: why not use my real name on the internet?

This is a response to a post by Frills on the question as raised by Kev Quirk.

And my honest thought is that if I had to use my real name on the internet, I wouldn't be on the internet in any meaningful way.^[1]

I have an extremely identifiable name. I am reasonably sure that I am the only person in the history of the world to have my precise combination of (extremely Portuguese) first name and (completely Anglophone) last name, and that's even setting aside my middle name. If I used even my first name on the internet, that (in combination with my fairly specific academic interests) would be enough to make me identifiable with a quick Google search.^[2] I genuinely don't know if I'd feel differently if my name was Mary or Emily or something, or if I studied something a little less niche.

The other factor of which I'm mindful is that I intend to teach. I've known that for as long as I've been online. Let me tell you, it is really hard to judge what sort of thing I don't want my students to be able to find easily in two or three decades' time. It is much easier to make it preëmptively hard for them to find everything.

So I've designed levels, basically, depending on the public-ness of the forum and also the level of personal relationship I expect to form. So, for example, Tumblr and my blog get a first initial and that's enough, but my book club^[3] gets a nickname and a family name from my mom's side as a last name.^[4] I don't give anyone on the internet my first name unless I'm ready for them to be able to find me in a real-life context—I'm approximately equally likely to give out my full first name and my home address (which is to say, not at all).

It's important to note that my goal isn't actually to be fully anonymous online, or even to have a pseudonymous persona that's fully separated from my IRL self. I know you can find me based on what I've shared online. But (a) you'd really have to work at it and to some degree I'm betting on simply not being that interesting and (b) it would be functionally impossible to know me in real life and find me on the internet without being extremely familiar with me personally in a way that students and professional acquaintances are unlikely to be.

I think that that latter point is often undervalued in discussions of using your real identifying information on the internet. If you have my first name and my research interests, you can find my actual University of [redacted] grad student profile, with my face and professional email and office hours; you are, however, extremely unlikely to find my personal site or my Tumblr.

When I was a (very anxious) small child, I was worried about what would happen if the house joined to ours caught on fire. My parents told me that the wall our houses shared was a firewall, and was designed to prevent the fire from travelling from one house to the next for about four hours, the hope being that by that point, the fire department would have been able to get the fire under control. Basically, my internet pseudonimity is that: not enough of a barrier to ensure permanent separation in case of a disaster, but enough of one to increase the probability of it.