Sometimes I bump into netters who have cultivated online identities over periods of weeks, months, or years. When they post to Usenet or log onto a MUD under a well-established handle, they feel truly at home in their digital skins. Many of the characters I've known exist only on the Net. There are real people behind them, sure, but only in cyberspace do the spores of human personality germinate into this particlular Brach's Pick-a-Mix of pirates, poets, clowns, superheroes, villains, armchair psychologists, and armchair psychopaths. I've seen people so comfortable in pseudonymous cloaks that they'd seem naked without them.*
I stopped using my corporeal name online about two years ago. It isn't because I don't want people to know it (you can find it if you know where to look, and I get addressed by it online regularly), but rather to emphasize the distinction between the "me" that exists online and the "me" that exists offline. There are some definite differences between the two - I am louder (as it were) online, and more confrontational. Perhaps I'm using the net as an outlet to express things in a way that for whatever reason I am unable to do offline.
You'll notice I used the word "corporeal" in the last paragraph, and
not "real". I don't consider my online persona any less valid or
"real" than my physical one. Thlayli is just as much my name as the
one I was born with, and if the rest of the world doesn't recognize that,
that's their problem, not mine.