"I'm not a mass-murderer!" Why we need Names 2.0

(by Martin Bryant)

A few days ago we received a bizarre email here at The Next Web. It suggested that I was a troubled individual who must be punished for my crimes. Weird? Yes. Worrying? You bet.

Luckily, it turned out the writer wasn’t referring to me but my namesake, the Australian mass-murderer Martin Bryant who killed 35 people and injured 21 others in a massacre at Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996.

Of course, this problem is widespread. Wherever people share the same name there’s room for confusion.

Is it time for Names 2.0?
The idea of having a first name and a family name used to suit us all. Back in the days when most people lived their entire lives within a small radius of where they were born it was fine. It was unlikely that you would bump into anyone with the same name as you in your village.

Now, two things have changed. Firstly, we’re a lot more mobile. Thanks to cheap flights we can travel to just about anywhere in the world within the space of a day if we really need to. It’s far more common than it was for people to move city, or even country, several times during their life. As a result, many of us meet a lot more people now than we would have done in days gone by.

Secondly, thanks to the internet we’re connected to a lot more people. These are both deliberate connections we make with people online and co-incidental, passive connections made when people see things we’ve posted, search for us or just stumble upon us in the way someone idly browsing the web is bound to.

So, with all these additional connections the potential for confusion between people of the same name grows significantly. Maybe we need to rethink the way we give out names.

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