It’s (just over) 6 months since I decided to abandon my Second Life-related accounts on other web services such as Twitter and Plurk. My original reasoning for this was that I was leaving SL. This happened, but I returned a short time later. The other accounts, however, remained with my real life details on. Anybody can look up my Plurk, Twitter or even Email account – the details for them are out there. The Plurk account itself is private, however I will always consider a friend adding me on there. So, has this little experiment of mine worked? Has it led me to be more myself online? Well, no, actually.

The only real thing that has changed is the usernames themselves. Instead of them being JohanYugen (or ThePurpleOne as my Twitter account was) they are JohnUK89. I was always showing the “Real Me” even on my JohanYugen username, so what has changed? The presence I now have online is no longer truly tied to my Second Life account. Even where I’ve met people to start in SL, they are starting (or already do) to call me by my real name. Obviously there are a couple who don’t, and for who I shall always be Johan and not John. That is also fine, since I was Johan online for quite some time (about 2 years in total) and continue to be Johan when inside Second Life.

So while I have remained the same person behind the keyboard, save a tad more confidence that I’ve gained over the past 6 months or so, my persona is slightly different. I feel as though I have traversed the gap between being a true citizen of the metaverse and become me online, something I had always wanted to do but never really had the chance to do before I moved away from my parents’. The worrying thing is, my parents would have tried to stop me from having a tangible presence on the Internet as me, so I had to use Johan as a way of avoiding detection. To have the freedom from that and thus being able to be truly me, not just me behind the mask of Johan, is truly empowering. The only conclusion that I can draw is that the experiment I mentioned earlier has worked and I am so much better for it.