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This is an old story now, but I'd been intending to write about it for ages, so here goes. A friend of mine was encouraging people they knew to register some sort of protest against Facebook's policy of refusing to let users create profiles using anything other than their real names. I know many people who have good reasons for not doing this, and thought yes, this was a reasonable cause to support fairly painlessly. My way of doing this was to change my profile name to something silly and disappear for a few days.

When I ventured back online I found that Facebook were insisting that my changed Profile was in fact a Page, representing a business or organisation. I couldn't change the name back without creating a new personal Profile to act as Administrator for the Page, and as I only have one email address I had to 'reclaim' that from the Page, meaning that I couldn't now access the Page as the email and the password associated with it were gone. I now have a new Profile with none of the data of the old and a phantom Page I can't get rid of. Facebook never responded to any requests for help, beyond automated messages sympathising with the fact that 'You appear to be having trouble logging on to your account'.

The point of all this was that I was shocked at how sad I felt at losing all the data associated with my old Profile - the photographs I'd posted, telling myself I was sharing experiences with friends who might be interested in seeing them, the things people had said to me and I had said to them, the items they'd sent me in return. This online identity had clearly become a more important part of my real identity than I realised; the exchanges I'd had with people, and perhaps even more the evidence of those exchanges, obviously affected the way I thought about myself. I know in theory how fragile identity can be, but this is a startling way of demonstrating it.

I'm now back on Facebook, but being much more reticent there. I'm using it as a means of keeping in touch with people who are important to me, rather than projecting any version of myself, which seems to carry grave dangers.