How well do I know you?

Reading Wendy Wickham and Janet Clarey's conversation about identity on line gave me pause. It's about more than just names isn't it? I mean, you can choose to blog under your real name or not. You can choose to join the various online spaces to which you belong under any name you like. I blog (and Facebook) under my real name, but I use pseudonyms for some of my special interest group spaces for reasons I covered in my comment on Wendy's post.

But I wondered how well we have actually come to know each other, you and I. For one thing, if you've never commented on this blog, I might not know you at all. If you have, I may still have only a limited view of you, based on your reactions to what I say, which is a pretty lopsided way to view a person.

Most of the time, I feel as if I know the people whose blogs I regularly read. I have seen their pictures, so would probably recognise them if we were to arrange to meet in a restaurant, say. But, once we got chatting, would they turn out to be consistent with the person I think I know? Janet once posted that she is quite a quiet person, which took me by surprise. What other surprises might there be? Might she also prove not to be as irreverent as I expect? Would Vicki Davis turn out to be insincere and impatient, after all? Would Stephen Downes turn out to be really great at small talk and not easily bored?

Of course, I didn't join the blogosphere to 'meet' individual people. I signed up to join the conversation. I don't only read blogs that belong to people whose company I think I might enjoy. Far from it. I read blogs that I think will stretch me, challenge what I know, expand my understanding, improve my professional practice. In some cases (especially where I have encountered the bloggers in other spaces, such as Ning communities, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) I feel as if I have gotten to know something about the person behind the blog - and that's a bit of a bonus.

In this space we could pretty much invent personae for ourselves, just as easily as we could invent names - although I suspect the personae would be far more difficult to sustain with any measure of credibility.

There are one or two pseudonymous blogs on my reading list. I often wonder - do the people who know Artichoke in person consider her writing style a dead give-away as to who she really is?

Do I really know you? If I met you, would you be as I expect? Do you really know me? Would you be expecting anything remotely like me, were we to arrange to meet face to face?