As I walked through the gym, trinkets, clothing, and papers began to pile up in my arms. It was the last week of school, our Commencement Prep Day.
We were shuffling through the room, trying to cross the items off of our index card. I talked to the staff from financial aid, picked up my Commencement regalia, got a mug from the Senior Class Gift Campaign team and a t-shirt from PNC Bank.
It was the opposite of orientation, really. Lacking the optimism that comes with the beginning of a new experience, we clinically tidied up the loose administrative ends of our college experience.
And then, at the last booth, we got the news. In mid-July, our school email accounts would close. It didn’t hit me until then that I would actually be graduating. I had mixed feelings – from surprise, to sadness, to relief.
Infrastructure of an Experience
For four years, our online inbox had been the portal to a part of our college experience. It was our stream, the real Twitter feed of that place and time we call College. A hodgepodge of funny messages from friends, morning emails from Mom, homework reminders from professors, and digest posts, it was the infrastructure that shaped and stored the narrative of our life.
It was an odd situation, too. We never got our fullname@gettysburg.edu. It was always the first four letters of or last name, followed by the first two of our first name, with two seemingly arbitrary numbers tacked on the end. I was palman01. That was my alias.
I quickly learned not to use this email for purchases and accounts online, because if I ever spoke with a customer service representative on the phone, that peculiar game ensued in which I slowly ticked off each letter and a corresponding childish word. “P” as in Peter, “A” as in Animal, “L” as in Lion. (That word game, by the way, has to be the funniest five minutes of every customer service representative’s day.)
A New Alias
The closing of our accounts made me think about the aliases that represent us in the digital age – specifically, the way our digital self is increasingly qualified and circumscribed by the limited choices we have of usernames and aliases that represent us.
The other day, I did a tally of my own email portfolio: three Gmails – two personal, one for grad school – one Aol, one Yahoo, and most recently, an Outlook.com account. The number of email accounts we maintain these days is frustrating for some, as it is for me at times.
However, I recently realized that my email frustration results less from the number of email accounts I have than from the reason why I have so many email accounts.
I couldn’t get anthonypalmer@[site].com, anywhere.
That was, until August of 2012, when Microsoft launched its new Outlook.com email service. Even though the site has an appealing design and aesthetic well-suited for the 21st century, I was hesitant about signing up for another email account.
But as I read David Pogue’s review in The New York Times, one of the concluding paragraphs made my decision easy:
If you think you might ever be interested, the time to check it out is now. Because the service is so new, you can snag almost any e-mail name. Instead of settling for CaseyNYC2938478521@outlook.com, you can be CaseyNYC@outlook.com.
Underneath Pogue’s half-humor is a profound truth about life in the digital age: the increasing difficulty of choosing avatars that represent us.
So I signed up for Outlook. I felt a bit of joy. I had finally won today’s digital lottery, “the highly coveted first/last name combo,” as Hung Truong put it.
This is fascinating to me, because nearly all academic, professional, and personal discussion of avatars focuses on the ones that are intentionally obfuscated — the Twitter handle that you want to keep private from co-workers, the secret blog you write about your hobby, and before that, the quirky, enigmatic IM handle you wanted your friends to be impressed — or at least not embarrassed — by.
Welcome to the new dilemma of the digital age. There’s a growing segment of the population that actually wants true aliases — email addresses, Twitter handles, etc. — to represent them, but they can’t get them because they’ve already been claimed.
Truong says that the first/last name combo is ideal because it is “super-easy to remember and to send to other people.” In reality, though, it’s much more than that: It is fully us. There is no conditionality to it.
CaseyNYC, the hypothetical emailer posed by Pogue, might eventually move from New York. Her alias is conditional upon her location.
There is no embarrassment when an acquaintance asks for your email and you give your fullname@gmail.com. Coffeeaddict12@aol.com, on the other hand, creates some awkwardness because it often requires an explanation. This is great if it’s an intentional form of personal expression, but let’s be honest — often, it isn’t.
The New Credential
In 2012, Fast Company reported that “books are the ultimate new business card.” I don’t think so. Just have bobsmith@gmail.com, and @bobsmith locked down on Twitter, and you’re on your way to the top. Isn’t it interesting how just claiming these digital properties gives one instant credibility?
Jessica Leber summed this new digital lottery brilliantly in a post on Medium describing the joy and reward she felt being an early Gmail adopter:
Almost 10 years later, and I often tell people my email address with a sense of pride. If someone fails to notice the cachet of my simple handle within a service with more than 400 million active users, I will sometimes resort to pointing it out.
She’s JessicaL@gmail.com. Not bad.
In June of 2012, Google announced that “425 million people are actively using Gmail,” with an additional 15 people signing up each month.
Given these trends, it seems that the digital lottery is getting harder and harder to win. And because of that, some people are getting ahead of the curve — at least for their children.
Here’s Matt Cerrone, founder of MetsBlog.com, in a post describing the steps he took to ensure his daughter’s claim to digital real estate:
The moment my wife and I picked a name for our baby, a month or two before she was born, I registered her a .com, a Twitter and Facebook account, and a Yahoo! and Gmail address. Frankly, to think these tools will even be relevant when she’s older is just as naive… but, at least I have them and someone else doesn’t.
I admire Cerrone’s initiative and creativity, and I think his daughter will thank him someday. However, this quote leaves me with more questions than answers: Will registering babies for email and social media accounts become as regular a routine as baby footprints and vaccinations? And, if stuck between two names for a child, will we eventually choose the one with the available corresponding domain and email address?
I can’t help but find a central tension in all of this, too. As cloud computing services offered by companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft offer consumers nearly unlimited digital space, the excitement is nullified by the fact that we’re running out of legitimate aliases that accurately and fully represent us.
It’s like wanting to name your restaurant Tony’s Pizza, but all that’s available is Rick’s Surf Shop.
Many people won’t think twice about having an email address with 42 numbers after their name. But the companies who want us to comfortably outsource our lives and memories to the cloud should be worried. There’s a growing cohort of us digital natives — and digital immigrants — who are prevented from fully inhabiting our digital skin.
