Double agent

The emergence yesterday of my 'real self' on Twitter (@stevewheeler) caused some confusion and consternation for some tweeps. It came about because of my question about whether people were called by their own names or by their Twitter names (if these were different). I was interested in whether people could separate out one's own personal identity from the digital identity we assume when we are engaged in online discussions.

The appearance of the 'second account' may have caused some confusion, and perhaps some are questioning my sanity, but in truth, I admit that I have already had four Twitter accounts for some time now. Not all have been active, and some are used only occasionally. There is method in my 'madness' though. You see, one of my great research interests is digital identity, and I'm especially interested in how we manage our online presence and engagement. Twitter is one of several tools I use to explore this concept. I have blogged previously on the topic here: (Identity in a digital age), and have also discussed our ability to manage multiple identities online (hence the multiple accounts), and I even blogged as recently as yesterday to tell the story behind the avatar image and name of @timbuckteeth (He's only me). Because I am interested in digital identity, I made a decision as soon as I subscribed to Twitter to explore. I decided I would like to experiment with the tool to see what the boundaries were in terms of online presence and identity, and also anonymity.

So I created an account with the contrived name of @timbuckteeth and an incognito profile picture to accompany it. Initially I had the idea that it should be an anonymous account, but it turned out to be something quite different, and it seems it has developed independently to my own actions. I have been experimenting since December 2007 with the @timbuckteeth account. I did create a second account @stevewheeler with my real picture a short while later, but it was a 'sleeper agent', ready to be activated at an appropriate point in time. Then, writing as @timbuckteeth I began to explore Twitter, and to experiment with all the possibilities. The person behind @timbuckteeth could not remain anonymous forever, so I gave up the pretense. Eventually @timbuckteeth became synonymous with my own professional and personal life online, and I think most people who know me, or follow my work, now combine the two identities into one - as you will see in a moment. There were of course one or two exceptions:

In four years of continuous use, the account of @timbuckteeth has enabled me to send out more than 32,000 tweets, has appeared on almost 1000 user choice lists, has followed in excess of 1,300 people, and has attracted a following of almost 10,000 Twitter friends. Notice I am not referring to them as 'my followers' - rather, I like to think that they follow the brand that is @timbuckteeth. Yesterday, after posting the 'He's only me' post, I posted out a question on Twitter:

Within seconds I received back a few interesting responses and some words of advice from some of those who follow the @timbuckteeth account and were concerned I might ditch it, or who were interested in seeing what would happen next:

Bearing Don Taylor's comments in mind, I then activated the @stevewheeler account to see what would happen next. What was the deal with 'name recognition'? The first interesting thing I noticed was that some of the hundred or so people who have followed this account in the last 24 hours are people I know, but who have never previously followed my @timbuckteeth account. Were they people who did not know I was behind the @timbuckteeth account? The sudden appearance of the 'real me' account yesterday also provoked some interesting comments from several old Twitter friends. Some expressed concern, while others advised me not to keep two accounts. Some even suggested (probably tongue in cheek) that @timbuckteeth was the real me, and that @stevewheeler was actually an imposter.

Notice that the last tweet refers to me as 'Tim', a name some people (including one or two of my students) have also called me in real life. It intrigues me to think that in this instance, and probably in many others too, people seem to become so habituated in engaging with your digital self (no matter how false or contrived it may be) that they eventually have difficulty separating it out from the 'real you'. I plan to write more on this episode, and about what I have learnt from my experiment so far, in my next blog post. Your comments, as ever, are most welcome.

Tomorrow: Double or quits

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Double agent by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.