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No, this is not about writing. Sorry. I have noticed people drifting out on that count, being my copious lack of talking about writing in the past few months. All I can say is that I'm really really stupidly busy right now, and once I'm settled into my still-fresh new dayjob and my sister's married off and my convocation's done (hello, autumn of major life changes) I will get back to the serious business of making books, yelling at them, and documenting this whole process for your pleasure.
This will be in approximately ten days to two weeks. Mark your calendars.
In the meantime, had a stray thought last night about social media (while poking around Facebook between turns in the epic death battle Scrabble game I'm playing with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala, stillsostrange, and tanaise).
I wonder if, in about ten years, people will just stop changing their names upon marriage.
Why? Well, it's already on the way out in North America for various social reasons. But the question is, well, one of social networking. Name changes make it ridiculously difficult to locate someone in the Internetverse; it's your best search string, the centre of your unique identifier -- not the whole of it for most people, but the centre. If you don't already have the information of the change, it's not impossible to corroborate that this is, in fact, the same person; there's always marriage announcements, things like that. But it's considerably harder than it would be otherwise, and you rely on people's archiving, on persistence and luck.
In looking through friends-of-friendslists last night, it occurred to me that there are people from most of my life I may not get a chance to reconnect with anymore. They've married and changed their names, and tracking them down will be difficult at best. The unbroken paper trail, data trail, public narrative of one's life is severed, at least partially, when you change your name. It's the same reason we keep our old e-mail addresses or send out change-of-address massmail when we change them; that LJ thought to automatically redirect links from an old LJ name to the new one upon a change; that we tend to stick to the same online handles/identities. So people can find us. If they come looking, we are here.
What I'm betting is that for those of us who grew up (to a partial degree, even) with that sense of...being receptive to connection, of carefully maintaining our data trail with either an eye to privacy or narrative completeness?
That's going to soon be more important than the social statement that changing one's family name at marriage is.
Now I just wait ten or twenty years and find out if I'm right.
This will be in approximately ten days to two weeks. Mark your calendars.
In the meantime, had a stray thought last night about social media (while poking around Facebook between turns in the epic death battle Scrabble game I'm playing with
matociquala, stillsostrange, and tanaise).I wonder if, in about ten years, people will just stop changing their names upon marriage.
Why? Well, it's already on the way out in North America for various social reasons. But the question is, well, one of social networking. Name changes make it ridiculously difficult to locate someone in the Internetverse; it's your best search string, the centre of your unique identifier -- not the whole of it for most people, but the centre. If you don't already have the information of the change, it's not impossible to corroborate that this is, in fact, the same person; there's always marriage announcements, things like that. But it's considerably harder than it would be otherwise, and you rely on people's archiving, on persistence and luck.
In looking through friends-of-friendslists last night, it occurred to me that there are people from most of my life I may not get a chance to reconnect with anymore. They've married and changed their names, and tracking them down will be difficult at best. The unbroken paper trail, data trail, public narrative of one's life is severed, at least partially, when you change your name. It's the same reason we keep our old e-mail addresses or send out change-of-address massmail when we change them; that LJ thought to automatically redirect links from an old LJ name to the new one upon a change; that we tend to stick to the same online handles/identities. So people can find us. If they come looking, we are here.
What I'm betting is that for those of us who grew up (to a partial degree, even) with that sense of...being receptive to connection, of carefully maintaining our data trail with either an eye to privacy or narrative completeness?
That's going to soon be more important than the social statement that changing one's family name at marriage is.
Now I just wait ten or twenty years and find out if I'm right.
