Thursday, February 14, 2008

What is in a name?

With the recent change in blog identity, I have a few thoughts on what exactly a name is. In the raw, it is a pronoun for the you-ness that pervades the universe manifested in the form of "you" better known as "Carol". That's Aristotle. Shakespeare argued that -ness is less reflected by the actual pronoun of an object, so a rose, even if it was called a glip, would smell, look, and taste like a rose. The rose-ness becomes glip-ness, but is the same -ness.
Sociologically, a name is for identity. A name shows your ethnic group, the era you're living in, and even some of your parents taste. Unfortunately, a name can be unfair and spoiled if the name doesn't work with characteristics you like. Still names help us identify each other, but here if you dislike one Bob because he is rude, you will be biased about other Bobs, sacrificing sociological mindfulness in favor of a simple biological response. That can't be helped. Similarly, I personally know several Katies, so how do I know which is which and that they're not all the same Katie-ness? Well that's where a name may be flawed. I know each Katie as an individual instead of as a Katie. So here a name is only the threshold to getting to know someone, after that it gets phased out.
Let's try and look at it the other way around where the name gets phased in via some semi-anonymous technology e.g. a blog. Over the internet, one has the sociological security of "knowing" someone by a pronoun that characteristics can be attached to. There's a creepy aspect here where you could SERIOUSLY misidentify a person, putting sociological mindfulness on a backburner and forgetting that the internet is something of a mask. Positively, when two people are not on a birth-name basis, they can get to know each other better. In a safe situation like this class especially, people can recognize each others chosen nicknames, get a gauge for that personality, and when a real name slips out that name anchors itself in something real and not a sociologically imagined meaning(knowing a person for a personality and not for their type of name).
Thusly, I miss my moniker The Mad Hatter. I felt it fit the blog better and allowed me to express myself a bit more freely in a sociological context as a -ness and not a concrete person that can be thought of as a separate entity than his thoughts. I have been raised to reply to and take responsibility for my actions taken under my name, so if I could blog as a different pronoun, I could say things I usually wouldn't without as much fear of a social consequence or stigmatization. I feel that because we are all now clearly identified in the blog-group as our student names, our insight won't necessarily be the same. In short, I am entirely opposed to this move and while it may work to help us all know each others names in class, I feel that's a process that will happen naturally. This also steals some aspect of the blog in my opinion where it is something where we know everyone's personality IN the class and then eventually recognize them in person. I think that would come too and it would be an interesting sociological experiment to see if people act similarly enough in the blog to how they act in reality, allowing us to identify them.
As a final point, this makes the blog more worksheet-esque. More open-ended, admittedly, but still signed with the same name that is on my drivers license. That was probably a mildly incoherent rant, but nonetheless, there's an opinion I don't mind having attached to my name.

No comments: