Being a child of the internet generation I am no stranger to the use of pseudonyms. The use of them obviously have positive and negative effects. The negatives have been covered so I'm not going to bring you down any further and instead focus on the positives I'm aware of through personal experience.
I understand why people choose to not be identified by their given names. To be free online in order to not effect their personal lives. I follow several theatre technicians of all sorts on Twitter, however they do not use their real names because of how small the theatre community is. Instead they use pseudonyms like "secret scenic" "secret props guy" "anonymous director" so that they can comment or complain about their daily theatre life without it ever hurting their careers or the people being talked about. Another example of this is an account called @Homophobes. It is a complete mystery as to who runs this account, all we know is that it is a gay male. He retweets homophobic tweets to demonstrate how hurtful they can be and give the original tweeters the attention they wanted. Usually it's pretty negative and they end up apologizing. Some of course will never learn and continue on their hurtful rants which is why @Homophobes stays anonymous for his own safety. The group called Anonymous is another obvious example of people who use a pseudonym for good and not evil.
I myself use quite a few different social networking websites all with different levels of how public or private my accounts are. Facebook is completely public, anyone can stalk you before a job interview so I don't get very personal and I watch my language now that I'm an adult. Twitter is slightly less public, I know that less people have twitter but I won't bad mouth anyone because I work in theatre and Calgary is a very small town when it comes to that. I also use tumblr which has gained a lot of popularity in the past year or two so that is also slowly becoming less private but I feel comfortable enough to rant a bit and complain about my roommates and such. (Can't do that on Twitter, they both follow me). Another place to rant with some old high school friends is Deviant Art, nobody really uses it anymore so it's pretty safe. Sometimes you just need to get your feeling out so that's where it happends. And it's almost guaranteed that nobody I work with now is going to find that one. The last one that I used to use before it sadly ended with the arrival of Instagram was Daily Booth. There was maybe two or three people that I actually knew in real life on the website and one of which is my girlfriend. Her and I used it to communicate to each other before actually dating, I owe the courting process and actually being asked out to Daily Booth. I used a pseudonym there and I blocked everyone else from finding it.
I use different variations of the same nickname for most of my social networking escapades so if you tried hard enough you could find all different sides of me but I take comfort in the fact that the likeliness of that is very slim. I understand the negative effects that could have and how people could go on a power trip but I enjoy it and I choose to use it for good.
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