At this point I have two personalities that I maintain.  In real life I’m Charles Luzar.  I have sandy blonde hair and blue eyes.  I’m average height and average weight.  In a crowd I wouldn’t exactly stand out.  I have a family and I have friends.  I drive a tiny, externally gated car with a loud exhaust that sounds like a Mack truck at wide open throttle.  People think I’m crazy for it.  I’ve lived a full, wild, happy, unremarkable life.  I have very few enemies, and most that I do have are females.  Woops.

Online I’m ChinoCharles.  I have been for almost a decade now.  I sat down a long time ago when the Internet first became a staple in our house and tried to think of a good username.  I had an instantaneous compulsion to create a name and stick with it.  Call it narcissism.  In darker days I thought I’d roll with “Erebus,” some silly reference to a dark and mysterious Greek god.  How cliche, right?  It wasn’t a brand.  Too common.  I needed something that was unique to me.  I took the first name of the lead singer of my favorite band (The Deftones) and stuck my name on the end and voila.  The ChinoCharles moniker was born.

8 or 9 years later I look back and try to reconcile what that second personality has become.  Chino is different from the living, breathing Charles.  He’s blunt, brash, outspoken, passionate, involved and ever-changing.  It sounds schizophrenic, but in reality it isn’t a limited phenomenon.  See, I know others with an online persona as well.  We all know them.  There are people all around us that recreate themselves daily online.  Its easy to do.  You may have an age and a list of traits, but if you register on a forum or a web site you’re essentially reborn.  Your age is 0 and your first impressions are dictated by what falls from your fingertips.  In person things like grammar, your sense of style, your vocal tone and inflection… all of these play a part in the impressions you generate in person.  This isn’t the case online.  I think that is one of the allures of the online space.  You can be a million things you could never be in person.  You can be a hipster without owning the jeans.

I am not proud of everything my online alter-ego has become.  That is one of the difficult things about branding yourself online.  I have done good things, sure, but I have done bad as well.  I’m content to live with them.  If you Google ChinoCharles you’ll find a running history of my life online: A Web Site, Twitter, Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger, MySpace, Yarisworld, Forced4s, Honda-Tech, MicroImage, MP3Car, Iflove, Ubuntu, Wordpress, YouTube and the list goes on.  How do you abandon that?  I certainly could, but I see no value in doing so now.

It highlights the importance of the decisions we make when we’re logged in.  Sometimes I go to events that were organized online and people call me Chino.  The two personalities, at that moment, have become one.

Seth Godin has an interesting take on this. He seems to embrace reinvention. You can be better online than you could ever be in real life, far away from our natural impulsions and preprogrammed reactions.  We can think before we type.  Why not be nice?

I plan on continuing under this moniker, but I’m realizing that I could improve.  I’m going to try to be a little nicer, a little more understanding, and a little more accepting.  I can do that.

Thats the beauty of it.