Like Mika, I’ve gone identity mad

Picture for the day: imagine Suzy (your version) sitting way up at the back of a beach staring at the sea, because the sea is filled with black fins of a suspiciously Jaws-like nature and she is not brave or stupid enough to venture further.

Does it matter if you know who a blogger is? I suppose that by knowing their real name, and seeing a photo of them, you can somehow relate them to yourself and they become more real for you, which means you can empathise better. Also maybe it’s a power thing, like in all those myths where knowing someone’s true name means you control them. If you know the blogger’s real name and face, you feel satisfied, because now they are on the same level as you – they are no longer a mystical figure, they are Michael Handcock, cursed with an unfortunately funny name and unfortunately spacious earlobes.

If you saw my face you might recognise me on the street. I don’t know how I’d react to that… it would be weird. But if you saw my face, when I retell my encounters with Rhiannon and Danny and CAMHS people and so on, you could stick it into the conversation and see a version of events closer to reality.

Is it important, though? Maybe if I read a blog where, even though the blogger assured us she was a right munter, I had built up a picture of her in my head looking pretty as can be, and she then posted a picture – I would get a shock. It’s shallow, but surely everyone judges on appearances, at least a little, however hard you try not to. I think I would feel let down, and when I read her posts I would probably view them in a different light, simply because I felt let down by her. Then again, there are three blogs I read where I’ve seen the faces behind them, and two of those three built me up for a fall with their descriptions of themselves and turned out to actually be just as pretty as can be, and the other one never mentions her appearance, and therefore gave me no preconceptions. They’re all female bloggers, though. Maybe we girls just like to judge ourselves.

If it turned out I was actually a fifty-year-old man, what do you think the reaction would be? OK, so I’d be a bit surprised, for one thing, but seriously now – this isn’t my attempt at testing the water before a confession – just hypothetically. If it turned out that a blog purportedly by a fifteen-year-old girl was by a middle-aged man, would people stop reading? Feel disgusted? Betrayed? Isn’t it the quality of the writing that matters, though? Every day older men write as younger girls and then it’s called being an author. But I suppose in that situation, you’ve entered into a contract with the author: it’s fiction, he knows it is, you know it is, and you’re prepared to accept that. When the same thing happens but that fiction is presented as truth, people get ditched by their publishing houses; they get taken to court. They’re liars.

To me, it just feels like validation of a friendship. You can make artificial friends with somebody over the internet, but only a real friend knows what you look like. Showing an internet friend a real-life photo brings the internet friend into your real-life world: I’d stop being Suzy Robinson, prolific blogger, and start being Suzy Robinson, blunt-fringed blonde kid with unrealistic dreams and hopes higher than Everest. And freckles.

Maybe I ought to do a sulz (yes, she really does have all the best ideas). She hid a post in her archives that linked to another hidden post, one which could be opened only with a password. If you found that post, you could ask for her password, and if you got it, you saw her photo. Theoretically, only her real internet friends would go to all that trouble, and if someone who wasn’t did, she could simply refuse the password. I never got the password. Then again, I never looked, because I missed the post in question by a couple of years.

Should I do that? Heh… I don’t know. It might be fun, though… Actually, before I get any high ideas, I would really like to know how you see me. I mean, take Chouette for an example (only because I’ve been reading her blog longest), who, for some reason probably related to the fact that chouette sounds like chat, I imagine as looking vaguely catlike. Do you have a very neat black bob, Chouette, and almondy eyes? I doubt it. But that’s the mental picture that has for some reason built up in my head from reading what you write and how you write… in fact, you look a bit like Amelie. From Amelie. (And then it turns out you are in fact Audrey Tautou, the woman who played her, and I am recognised internationally as a psychic of the highest order. Nice work, Suzy.)

(The title is talking about Grace Kelly, by Mika. I just realised that unless you’re in love with Mika (well, his hair, at least) you may not have caught the line in question as he sang it. Not that fancying him would make any difference… oh, well.)

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