When I was 16 I saw someone get glassed in a pub over something they’d said on the local phpBB punk forum.
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Email is a Destination
Lately, I’ve been thinking about online identity, and I realise that I’ve always seen email as a destination.
I first came to this position early, in primary school around 1995, when my class was first introduced to email. The school had a new computer lab and part of a lesson involved sending an email to each other at adjacent desks. I found the whole exercise felt pointless due to blunt literalism.
What was so exciting about sending a message to someone sitting a few seats away? I totally misunderstood the promise of the global information highway. But the idea of sending a message from A to B stuck with me, an email address isn’t an identity, but a destination.
As an emo kid on MSN, my first Hotmail address was song_lyrics_connected_by_underscores. During the 2000s, recruiters found unprofessional when I applied for jobs. I found this feedback puzzling. It never occurred to me that an email address could be part of my public persona, a reflection of me – it was just where messages landed, like a home address for letters.
As a tween I also had a Yahoo address, which when Yahoo forced its vanity URL restructuring on Geocities, the Star Trek fanfiction I’d written with a friend became connected to me. Which as you can imagine was mortifying.
It clued me in though, that there was a platform tendency to centralise and connect online identity. So I deleted both the site and my Yahoo email in protest.
I switched to Gmail in 2006 – a nice clean slate. Mindful of my Hotmail experience I picked three words separated by full stops. A set up for a pun that only gets its punchline if someone asks about about the combination of word. A small joke that 20 years later still has its punchline once or twice a year. It still doesn’t represent ‘me’ in any way though.
Over time, I noticed many treat email like an identity, so I keep separate accounts for personal and professional use. Still, I’ve never ‘been’ any of them. They’re letterboxes, not personas.
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These deep geologic email experiences however have influenced how I’ve approached online identity online ever since.
An email simply grants access to an different identity in code space. There are three layers: Email, handle, screen name. Accounts float above and are separate to email.
Back on MSN, it was my screen name that represented me—a phrase, or song lyric, maybe the date of my punk band’s upcoming gig, a piece of moody poetry, that captured my adolescent angst.
Like I said, I was an emo kid!
My screen name felt like “me” and I would update it all the time. The email behind it was just the destination or identifier not an identity.
I’ve always changed my display name frequently—far more than most of my peers—which has confused twitter followers over the years.
But my handle, @thejaymo, has stayed constant. It feels different from an email address. My screen name, @thejaymo is the public, persistent identity that I’ve chosen for myself.
It came about in the 2000’s when I was 17 and on tour with my band. I played a lot of Pokémon, and my bandmates started calling me Jay-mo for monster. At some point, I said, “It’s THE Jaymo to you”. Then I joined MySpace, and the rest as they say, is history.
For years, I kept my offline self, Jay Springett, separate from my online persona. I never shared my face online throughout the 00s. Eventually however, with smartphones and social media that became impossible. So I gave up even on pseudo anonymity.
I tell you what though, one of the sharpest lessons I ever learned about the bleed between digital and physical identity was as a teenager. Well before social media even existed. When I was 16 I saw someone get glassed and badly injured in a pub over something they’d said on the local phpBB punk forum. “Chat shit online, get banged in real life.” And since then, basically for almost all my adult life, I’ve been cautious about what I post online.
What we say online has the power to affect how we are treated in person. It’s something I’ve always been super mindful of. Which has sort of resulted in “@thejaymo” being a character I play, or a puppet that I bring life to online. A somewhat curated version of myself. A brand called you.
Which means that people have formed all sorts of impressions of thejaymo from different angles. I’ve been recognised by my voice at a conference before, some people have never visited my website or even seen a photo of me but listen to this show all the time. Plus, there’s the video version on YouTube so there’s a handful of you who only know me via that medium, in that context. And then there’s the ‘voice’ of my writing on my blog.
What’s funny though. When people meet me in real life for the first time, many people comment on how tall I am IRL. I don’t think that @thejaymo gives off short king energy but what do I know?
Ultimately, we’re more than all of our digital identifiers.
People forget that behind every screen name, there’s a real person—one who might even be taller than you think.
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