Just this morning whilst lying awake I wondered what sort of tag LiveJournal users use to specially identify each other in posts, and then I find out that Adam has obliged me.

I wonder how healthy it is for people on LJ to identify each other by username when they know each other much better in real life. "I had lunch with myth." No, you had lunch with Adam, who is much, much more than his journal or his username. Do I go around calling myself "brainwane" and saying "I hung out with leonardr"? Certainly the demands of weblog posting are different from the demands of face-to-face conversation, and people on LiveJournal are posting to a community where the internal representation of "Adam" is generally less accessible than the internal representation of "LJ user myth." But don't you get into Eco-y catastrophe territory if you start mistaking the signifier for the signified? And doesn't that mistake get more probable if you're operating on three layers of symbolism (username --> real name --> person)?

I suppose that perhaps people on LiveJournal think the symbolism goes more like (username --> person) and think that a username is just as "real" a name as the one on your birth certificate. But you don't know a person via a weblog the same way you know 'em through face-to-face interaction. I'm not saying you know 'em better or worse, just differently, although I harbor a suspicion that you simply don't know someone as well if you just know 'em online, ever since I met Leonard after reading his weblog for a year and a half.

I'm not my whole self here. If you are your whole self in your weblog, if I could completely know you by just reading your weblog, then you've broken some barrier and become a Philip K. Dick character, or you have a very small life.