But the separate identity people are actually part of an older tradition (and yes this environment is old enough to have an older tradition). It’s the tradition of the Handle, and it comes from back when computer networks were esoteric, back when using them was a marker of class. Back before Eternal September. I think that culture began because the people you’d meet online (be that bbs, or compuserve, or whatever) were exactly people that you’d rarely meet in real life; that was the beauty of the networks, that you could meet interesting, intelligent people who you would never otherwise have access to, but with some other, better kind of proximity; shared interests, shared tastes, shared culture at some level.
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Emlyn O’Regan, “Google+, the pseudonym banstick, and the netizen cultural schism”, Point7, 24 July 2011
