Internet identities

A friend of mine who is staying with me in my apartment for the week just asked me what I was doing. I replied that I was writing for my blog. She wasn’t sure which one I meant.

It dawns on me that I have acquired several internet identities. By saying that I am writing something for my blog, I could have meant several things, all of which would have been equally plausible:

*the blog on my personal website
*the blog I have on blogspot.com
*the blog that I keep on my MySpace page and update whenever I have comedy news
*the “notes” that I have within the Facebook notes feature
*the video log that I kept during my year abroad
*the bulletin posts on my YouTube channel
*eh...the corrections that I submit to Tila Tequila’s Wikipedia page?

This fragmentation of identity, dear reader, has been observed elsewhere, more astutely and more comprehensively than I am doing here. What I bring to the discussion is the following question:

By keeping so many internet identities, are we trying in vain to preserve ourselves, if only just in part, much like Voldermort with his horxcruxes?

If you do not get the Harry Potter reference, good for you.

(Initially I was trying to formulate some sort of allusion to the Borges story “The Garden of Forking Paths”, but decided against it because it (a) required too much mental energy, (b) struck me as being a bit pretentious, and (c) isn’t actually as relevant a comparison as the Harry Potter one. So while, once again, I applaud you if didn’t get the reference, it still might be in your best interest to go read the first four of five HP books in order to get the comparison I am making.

Either that or just use context to figure it out...Yeah, on second thought, you should definitely just use context.)

The answer to the above question, by the way, is no.