I have colleagues that are afraid to reveal who they are while online.  They are afraid that if they put any personal information online, somehow their identities will immediately be stolen and used for nefarious purposes.  They use avatars for personal appearance, and fake names to identify themselves.  They avoid social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn like the plague.  How wise are they?  How important is it to “remain invisible” online?

Myself, I have no reluctance at all to reveal who I am… just like in the real world.

Hi, my name is Hugh – William Hugh Chatfield.  Although I go by the name of Hugh, I use my first name in Facebook so as not to be confused with the other Hugh Chatfield in NYC – photographer and stand up comedian.

I have a company called CyberSpace Industries 2000 Inc.  We specialize in XML Training and Consulting and Multimedia Productions.

You can follow what interests me at “Hugh’s World“.

Why do I do this?  Well – who is going to do business with an unknown person, who may or may not have a company, puts up a picture of some beast from War Craft as his image, and stays out of all forums and social networks.  I do this in face to face meetings – why not online.

Imagine where Michael Moore might be if nobody knew him.  He is probably known pretty much world wide by now, and has a solid web presence.

How about Robert J. Sawyer – an author from Mississauga, who not only answers questions in his online forum, publishes sneak previews of novels, sells autographed copies of his novels online, but is quite open to sharing his views of interpretations of the quantum mechanical 2-slit experiments with me personally.  Imagine if he hid online.  Would this have an impact on his success?  I think so.  He is a very accessible person online…. and incidentally my current most favorite SF author.  He is responsible for getting me back into reading good Science Fiction again.  I had forgotten how much fun and mental stimulating this could be.

As for the question of theft of identity.  Well – I don’t share passwords, or account numbers.  The information that be obtained online is about the same as you can get offline.  Who lives at my address – look it up in the reverse directory.  No problem.  Phone books will give you my phone number, and even the number for my business since it is at the same address.  You could go to the local library and scan through back issues of the newspapers to find my letters to the editor.  You could look up proceedings and technical journals to see the papers I have written.  My past is available at the archives in Ottawa and Winnipeg.  If you needed to, you could compile quite a profile of me from currently existing non-online records.

Now certainly the online world improves the speed at which you can collect this information, but I don’t think any of it gives anyone a better chance of doing bad things to me.  It certainly is eclipsed by the benefit of advertising who you are, what your skills are and what your company can provide…. and in the online world – getting to the top of the heap in a search engine is important.  As an example, a Google search on “Ottawa XML Training” gives you a list where my company is #3.  War Craft Beast won’t even show up.

I’m not saying that one should be lax about security matters.  I am just saying that in the online world, connections are what counts.  If there is one thing I have learned about connections is the serendipitous way new opportunities can open up.  Opportunities that just can’t happen any other way.

I like to refer to a 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly by Vannevar Bush entitled – “As We May Think“.  As science advisor to the president, Bush was thinking out loud about what the scientists could do now that the war was ending.  He discussed a device called a Memex.  Now since this was 1945, although electronic, the best the machine could rely on was microfilm for storage.  An important aspect of the machine was it’s dual screens and the ability to create a link between the frames on the two screens.  In fact a collection of links could be created, given a name and shared across users… the named trail (which I usually dub a “Vannevar Trail”), can be more important than the information it links.  This was in fact a “connection machine”.  Not bad thinking for 1945.  Bush saw way back then that these information connections would be critically important… but the key piece was that these named trails had to be shared… not invisible.  So, if I am interested in this article, how might I get other peoples opinions on the article.  Simple – start up a Facebook group called  M/X – sort of a reference to a 21st century memex.

So I think that trying to remain invisible online makes about as much sense as forgetting to advertise your company – won’t get you much new friends or business.

Cheers…Hugh