15th Jun 2008
Bucky is Daniel
Many folks know me from Second Life. I’ve been in that wonderful Virtual World since March 2006, and have done many projects and have met many great folks.
As is very common in SL, people tend to be known by the name of their avatar. My nickname in real life has been “Bucky” for quite a while, so it seemed like a natural to pick the name of Bucky Barkley in SL. Someone is bound to ask me why it is ‘bucky’ (lowercase) in SL — was I trying to be e.e. cummings? The answer is much simpler: it was a typo that I cant undo!
What is not so common is to connect the Avatar and the Real Person :)
There are some successful folks in SL that could live right down the street from me, and I would never know it. There is a blank slate that one has to work with when defining an online self. It can be very easy to want to keep ones SL identity completely separate from their life.
In my case, I am pretty much an augmentist (see Immersives and Augmentists, and Gwyn’s bit on “Immersionism and Augmentationism Revisited“). There are some fun opportunities to go immersive, but I am pretty much Daniel in Second Life — being myself.
So, why bother to tie my SL identity to me? Well, I am comfy with it, and some will know me a bit better as a result. And.. there is Opportunity.
I’ve done a lot in SL, and a fair bit with my real life work. I want my Real Life experience to open up opportunities for projects I can do in SL, and vice versa.
I will be pointing the wordpress blog for Bucky over here, and will figure out how to point my resume at a list of SL projects. I’m also going to stop using the Twitter account for Bucky, and point folks at @javajoint. Another thread in all of this is to reel in from having my internet experience get too fragmented!
In any case, perhaps this will catch on and we will see a wave of “Identity Consolidation”! Nah :) I think it’s very tied to who is using a virtual world as an extension of themselves, versus an escape that is quite different from their everyday life.
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