The only thing that worries me about your little pearl of wisdom ("The message, though, is to choose wisely.") is that this is generally only going to help 12-13 year olds.
Unless your readers are in their (very) early teens, they're all in the same boat - an old identity (mine goes back about 17 or 18 years now) that we just can't risk letting go of.
I'd love to shake the online name I picked from a Forgotten Realms book nearly 20 years ago (apols for the geek-out), but how?
I saw your headline on Twitter and hoped for an answer, but now I see that, just like a tattoo, the only way to change an online identity is through an expensive, time-consuming process.
For a long time now, I’ve been mrdatahs. It’s my ZDNet handle, my Twitter handle, my Facebook profile, my primary email address…you name it. It all started not long after I began teaching at our local high school, when a student suggested that I get a Gmail account. It was invitation-only at the time and when he made me a member of the exclusive little Gmail club, it didn’t occur to me that chris.dawson@gmail.com would be a good idea. It had to be something interesting, right? I hadn’t even started blogging yet and, in Internet years, 2004 is ancient history.
So I picked mrdatahs for my username. Most of the students either called me Mr. D or Dawson and I was at Athol High School, so mrdatahs seemed a nice fit. And after I started blogging for ZDNet and Jennifer Leggio introduced me to Twitter, it still seemed apt, so I became @mrdatahs.
Suddenly, I was writing for ZDNet, had thousands of followers on Twitter, and was building a professional following and digital footprint that had much more to do with me as Chris Dawson, writer/blogger/Ed Tech guy/Google Fan than it did with me as Mr. Dawson, Athol High School Teacher and Tech Guy. And then I started co-writing the Google blog, taking me farther from my AHS roots.
And then I wasn’t even a teacher at the high school anymore. I was technology director for the district and worked out of the superintendent’s office. It might not seem like a big deal, but a remarkable amount of my online presence was wrapped up in me being Mr. D at AHS. It didn’t feel authentic and it certainly felt out of date and out of touch with where I stood professionally. People still said “Hi, Dawson” or “Hey Mr. D” when I’d go to the high school, though, for whatever crisis happened to be plaguing their network, so it was sort of OK.
I even thought about ways to re-parse my online identity. Mr. Data something…What could that HS mean? My mom suggested “helping students” but it was just too cheesy. So I ignored it. It was just an email address and Twitter handle, right? As long as people had me in their contacts or were following me on Twitter, did it matter?
