It's interesting to contrast the Japanese style of online identity (which inspired 4chan) and the style that Zuckerberg is trying to promote.
Millions of Japanese have profiles on sites like Pixiv (popular art site with ~15m images) or Nico Nico Douga (popular video site with ~15m videos). They create art, videos, etc, and upload them under a name. Many of these people earn money off their work, publishing doujinshi at Comiket, creating art and promotional videos for commercial games, and so forth.
But there's no attempt to ensure that these are real names. Typically they're aliases. Even their most popular social networking site, Mixi, works the same way. To the Japanese, there's absolutely no reason why "my life as a doujin artist" and, say, "my life as a software engineer", should be given the same name.
Interestingly enough, this is how it often seems to have worked in the West as well... prior to Facebook.
Millions of Japanese have profiles on sites like Pixiv (popular art site with ~15m images) or Nico Nico Douga (popular video site with ~15m videos). They create art, videos, etc, and upload them under a name. Many of these people earn money off their work, publishing doujinshi at Comiket, creating art and promotional videos for commercial games, and so forth.
But there's no attempt to ensure that these are real names. Typically they're aliases. Even their most popular social networking site, Mixi, works the same way. To the Japanese, there's absolutely no reason why "my life as a doujin artist" and, say, "my life as a software engineer", should be given the same name.
Interestingly enough, this is how it often seems to have worked in the West as well... prior to Facebook.