They say you always remember your first time ...
The conference was great. Rode up with Akaka[01] (Kama and Dancerfish were in Kama's car) and had a good long talk about our early education experiences (lots of homeschooling, lots of science fair), our wonderful times as Gillian's students, a brief and awkward divergence into personal matters, from which we recovered to go back to those earlier
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I think part of the pseudonym thing might be a generational (or, anyway, time-passage-related) phenomenon. I've noticed that, since the early days of my internet use (which was earlier than some, but later than many: See middle late to late late 80s for details), pseudonyms have gradually lowered in coinage just in general usage: a username today is much less likely to be used in conversation. Now, personally, this may be because I've started using the internet much more often to communicate with people whom I know already, as opposed to IRC-ish group environments. Truth be told, large chats always frustrated me. However, I think another level of it might be that, for people of our age, the time when we want the internet to be characterized by fluid identity and anonymity is slowly ending. It's become more importent to us to be able to be contacted, to contact, and to exert the kind of influence that requires a personal connection. The chief value of being able to ditch any identity at will and start over has been supplanted by the advantages of a static identity. We don't want to bother earning our "net cred" all over again.
On the other hand, it could just be social mores of the system. And, although I've seen less of it than in diaryland, I have seen use of LJ usernames and other miscellaneous things used as pseudonyms, and I'm far from having read a great many LJs or Diarylands.
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I've noticed much less of this amongst my LiveJournal peergroup.
My samples are confounded, because my DLand contacts are mostly New College and my LJ contacts are mostly NBTSCampers, so the differences may be between the cultures of those two groups rather than the cultures of the two OLJing media.
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So the consequences of the situation described for handles are twofold. First, you feel kinda special about being on-line, and you pick a handle to feel cool, to establish your identity. Second, you're more likely to actually interact with people you don't know at all IRL.
I'm pretty much agreeing with you, just with a bunch of analysis. I also use the Internet to communicate with people I already know these days. It's been a long time since I've made a new friend solely on-line. I'm aware that there are places I can go where I can be anonymous, but in general, I've completely sacrificed that for the static identity thing. It has in fact never been possible to be less anonymous. I responded to the namespace problem by picking a (AFAIK) unique username. Thus I'm aware that anyone who sees me logged on anywhere as Julieclipse (potentially) instantly knows everything about me.
I'm still not sure how I feel about that.
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