Proposal

Think back to the 1990’s when instant messaging was starting to take off and you had to choose a name for internet activity for the first time. If my memory serves me right, it seems that just about everybody naturally chose an alias to chat with friends and neighbors on the web. My question is why? Why do internet users instinctively choose names other than their own? Maybe it’s fun; maybe it’s a way of being creative. Whatever the reason, people, for the most part, simply did not and do not use their real name for internet identification.
I guess you can call this a look back at the history of anonymity and published works through time. After all, everything anybody submits, sends, looks at or posts is technically a published piece of work. Ultimately though, I want this research to be specific to the use of names through published works in history. I want to research the trends in choices of usernames and determine how certain trends get started. This may sound a bit weird but resources for this project could be things like cave drawings, the bible, Bill Shakespeare, early letters to the editor in newspapers, ect..

Remember the movie Sleepless In Seattle? Tom Hanks’ son (Jonah) called into a radio station and told this heartbreaking story and it was eventually slugged, “Sleepless in Seattle” Hanks (Sam Balwin) and his son became popular figures or shall we say “microcelebrities” over the radio waves through being so candid behind this name (It's fiction but it seems relevant).

So does anonymity begin and end with a name? Surely not.