Mention my name in Sheboygan, and you might hear that I have some bulldog puppies for sale, or that I’m a reverend on the lam. If you believe my inbox, I also have a mother who keeps goats, run a B&B in Wales, book bands for my bar in Savannah, and promised to bring a keg to that one party.

Twenty nine years ago, I was born Andrew Donald Miller. I was in good company: Andrew was the 13th most popular boy’s name in the US during the 1980s, and growing up I always knew a few other Andrews. Donald fared less well, and my lifelong wariness of the name is borne out by the statistics: ‘Donald’ hit its peak of popularity during the Depression, and never recovered.  Combine a popular first name with Miller, a surname almost as bland as “Smith” (“Miller” is currently the 7th most popular surname in the US) and it’s surprising I don’t hear more of my namesakes’ exploits.

And hear of them I do. Once or twice a week I get an email intended for another Andrew Miller. As a result, I’ve had to become an expert human spam filter. When an errant email makes its way to my inbox, I scrutinize it to determine if it’s actually spam or an honest message gone astray. Usually I simply ignore it and hope the sender and their Andrew work it out, but sometimes I feel compelled to respond. My earliest and most prolific miscorrespondent is a woman who calls herself “GoatWoman2000″. When I first started getting email from her in 2007, I assumed it was spam. Here’s GoatWoman2000′s first email to me:

November 7, 2007

Oh my word, if you need a laugh…you have to

read this…from our pastor Lowell…just

WAY to funny!

Have a great day,  Jill, your mom, auntie

Note: forwarded message attached.

The message was seemingly innocuous, but I noted a few oddities. First, there’s the—let’s just admit it—porny name GoatWoman2000,  and the exhortation to open an attachment. Spam klaxons sounded, and I ignored it. But as the emails continued, sometimes multiple emails a week, I finally responded. By February 2008 (after several reply attempts) I began to realize that GoatWoman2000 wasn’t going away, and either she never read her own inbox or my replies were going into her spam filter. It was around this time that she started calling me “Eeyore”. A few months later, she began to send me photos of her goats. Most of the emails are religious forwards, annotated with statements like “for HIS glory!!!!!” and I’m legitimately confused as to whether she’s my mother, auntie, grandmother or great-grandmother. I think it’s possible that multiple people are using the email account, since I sometimes get emails from “Jill” and alternately from “Grammy” and sometimes from “Grammy and Jill”. Last year she started sending me e-cards. I’ve often wondered what the ‘real’ Andrew Miller thinks of all this. The emails are never urgent, and I can tell he sees GoatWoman occasionally. I wonder what relationship would sustain this kind of unreciprocated communication.

Most of my misdirected mail never gets that far. In the last few years, I’ve taken to signing my name “Andrew 2″ in my replies, partly to assuage senders’ embarrassment and partly so I can find the emails again. While I don’t reply to all of them, I seem to be getting a larger volume based on my reply rate. Last year I sent  24 “Andrew 2″ replies, and I’ve already sent 18 this year so far. Mostly the emails are from mothers whose sons don’t call home enough; in this respect I am average for my namesakes. Sometimes the emails are bizarrely accurate in some respects, like the one from Atlanta-based band “The Well Reds” (They’re good! You should check them out.) After an exchange with their frontman (who was hoping to book a show at my bar) I bought their EP, and they autographed it. Sometimes my namesakes are far-flung: last year I got an email from a travel agent wishing me a safe return from my honeymoon in Buenos Aires. After one exchange, I was invited to stay at my “relatives’” delightful hotel in Dorset, England. I haven’t been yet, but it’s on the list.

Most of the exchanges are light-hearted, and even pleasant. Until recently, the most serious exchange occurred when an accountant mistakenly sent me another Andrew Miller’s tax forms. But the bulldog emails, it turns out, were more pernicious. They started arriving late last year, one or two a month, and I just couldn’t figure them out. They came from different cities, but they all referred to my bulldog puppies for sale. There didn’t seem to be any apparent criminal motive. I never imagined that “I” was the one doing the scamming!  It turns out that another Andrew Miller has been blanketing small newspapers with classified ads for bulldog puppies. When unsuspecting dog-lovers email him, he replies with photos of puppies and asks them to send him their credit card info for fast puppy delivery. Just a classic scam, really. In retrospect, I’m actually glad for the people who mistakenly emailed me — hopefully their error prevented them from being duped. But I do feel a little tarnished by the whole experience, as if my Andrew Miller-ness was being challenged. And about that “Sheboygan” reference: I really did get an email recently from someone who read my bulldog ad in the Sheboygan Sun.

Now I’ll admit that I’m a co-participant in this digital identity play. As an early adopter, I’ve been quick to stake my claim on as many digital properties as I can. I own AndrewMiller.net, my name at gmail.com, @andrewmiller on Twitter, Facebook.com/andrewdmiller and many others. Just this morning I signed up for Spotify (I’m andrewdmiller). But despite the occasional mistweet, email is far and away the main source of confusion. Last October another Andrew Miller even offered to buy it from me (I declined). But the medium itself is also to blame. I have friends of friends on Facebook with my exact name, but we never get confused because modern social systems have a more robust identity system. You don’t just Facebook message someone out of the blue; they have to be in your contacts list already. An email address is much more like a phone number in this way; imagine being one digit off from the phone number of a pizzeria and you get the idea. People simply remember that their friend said something like “it’s my name at gmail” and type it in. But I can’t change my name as easily as one could change a phone number. My name is my label, and to change an email address because it contains my own name seems like a tough price to pay. So far it’s been a minor annoyance. But if an Andrew Miller were to do something truly bad, I’d have to change my email address or switch away from email entirely and move to a walled garden like Facebook or Google+. Email is the most open and accessible direct communication medium ever invented, but this flexibility comes with some tradeoffs.

I’m not the first to write about these issues. Fellow Georgia Tech student Nirmal Patel wrote eloquently about his own name, and its meaning in Anglo-centric America. English comedian Dave Gorman has mined his own (surprisingly unusual) name for two entertaining books about searching for his namesakes: “Are You Dave Gorman?” and “Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure“. The Freakonomics guys wrote a fascinating piece about baby names and race over at Slate.

But I’d hope to add a note to the conversation: that having a common name can be as enlightening as having an unusual one. Our names are the first gifts we get from the outside world. They brand us with cultural, temporal, even racial markers. Mine has connected me to a whole world of other Andrews, and reminds me, once in a while, of how big that world really is. So here’s a toast to all my other Andrews brothers: be well, do good work, and call your mother, will you?

—Andrew 2

I know my relationship to social media is abnormal; I essentially study social network sites for a living. And yet there was nothing cyberpunk or early-adopter about the experience or my desire to share. It’s simply the way a milestone life event happens in 2011. And in generalities, it’s very similar to the way a marriage proposal has always been propagated. In Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, for example, there’s a telling scene in which Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the mother of Mr. Darcy’s intended, rushes round to the home of Eliza Bennet to castigate her for agreeing to marry Mr. Darcy, a proposal he has yet to make! (If you haven’t read the excellent Austenbook go now. I’ll be waiting.) The key difference seems to be that in our case, the message came directly to our friends’ news feeds. Within minutes, the congratulatory messages began pouring in from across the world.

So I was struck by a talk Sherry Turkle gave as part of the promotional tour for her new book “Alone Together” in which she asserted (among many other things) that we have gone from having a feeling and wanting to share it to sharing in order to have a feeling. She argues that social media technology, particularly phone-based messaging and social network apps, have reworked our reward centers and warped our experience of life. But for an event like an engagement, the point of the whole exercise is to affirm your love in the eyes of your family, friends and acquaintances. It’s always been performative, it’s just now the articulation is more discrete. I accepted the proposal on the top of the hill, but I became engaged when my world knew I had done so. If this sounds cold to you, ask a married couple when they felt they were married: when they signed the papers in the courthouse (something I hope to do someday) or when they affirmed their marriage in a ceremony in front of their friends and relations.

I did, however, notice something in the past week that Turkle didn’t mention in her talk but which bears thinking about: what happens to those who live off the network? Robert and I sing in a choir every week and some of the choir members are our friends on Facebook but most are not. When we arrived at rehearsal this week, we were met with hugs and congratulations from our Facebook friends, and brief puzzlement from our offline-only acquaintances. While their congratulations (after being informed) were equally as heartfelt, I can’t help thinking that the gap between those on the network and those cut off from it had a real effect. So while sites like Facebook might strengthen weak ties within the network (as I believe they did over the last week), they might reciprocally weaken offline-only weak ties.

The morning after we got engaged, we boarded a plane for Atlanta and returned to our daily lives (and really, the transition from Scotland to Atlanta has got to be one of the most jarring within the English-speaking world). And while our Facebook announcements may have been par for the course these days, we did add an Internet twist: we ordered custom engagement rings on Etsy.

This age of social data presents us with a new set of tools for self-presentation and peripheral awareness, and countless new ways to be awkward. For example, a former colleague used to update twitter so comprehensively that he even tweeted his bathroom breaks. But such early-stage hiccups are not the big story here – every electronic medium has its own specific “reply all” potential. The real change is the new computational layer mediating our interactions with each other and our environment. Using FourSquare on my iPhone, I can tell people when I’m at a bar (or when I’m actually in the office for a change!). Using Google Reader I can share blog entries or newspaper articles I find interesting, and attach a short note (especially important if irony is involved). Using Last.fm I can share what music I’m listening to right now, and anyone who clicks through to my profile can get a pretty good picture of my music-listening preferences. Facebook lets me share all of the above, as well as update my status and comment on any of my friends’ actions. And of course, there’s Twitter, which I use mainly as a way to stay in touch with techie friends in academia and industry, but which often veers into in-jokes and gossipmongering anyway.

In fact I create so much social data every day, that when setting up my ‘lifestream’ I found myself selecting a subset of all the possible data I could push. I told myself at the time that this was to avoid the andrewmiller.net visitor from feeling overwhelmed, but really it was an exercise in self-curation – the selection of information about myself that I wanted to represent me as if it were my real-time CV. I chose to make this a service-level decision, excluding FaceBook (which is where I discuss emotional, political, and other semi-private topics). But I have on occasion gone in and removed certain tweets that for one reason or another I felt were not appropriate for andrewmiller.net but I didn’t feel like removing from Twitter.

I admit I’m an early test-case, but I think we’re months, not years away from my generation having to deal with these issues. As services like FaceBook open up our homepages to the public (or at least allow us to do so) and as services like Twitter, with a culture of public sharing, reach mass adoption, our virtual and physical identities are going to have to merge. This is one of the central issues I’m trying to unpack in the Human-Centered Computing program here at Georgia Tech, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Comment, shoot me an email, send me a tweet @andrewmiller or whatever other channel you’d like.

This in some ways is an extension of a process that began with the shift away from software-as-artifact.  When applications were primarily delivered in physical containers and installed into computers, adding functionality to a particular machine required attention and preparation.  This is still true for domain-specific programs like video-editing suites; the user must be prepared to restart the computer at least once, and will often set aside time for the installation process.  Sometimes an IT admin is required to get everything working correctly.

In contrast, the software-as-a-service model championed by Google and others eliminates installation requirements, local configuration (although enabling “offline mode” for these applications does still feel like an installation process) and frees users from ties to a single computer.  Users of Google Docs, for example, can access and edit their documents on multiple computers without separate installs.  I myself have used this feature to take work documents home without lugging my work laptop.

Although software-as-a-service has yet to catch on with many people (just one look at the sales figures of MS Office should be all you need) offerings like Evernote point to an evolution of the concept even before it’s reached mass adoption: software-as-a-platform.

Evernote is certainly not the first “software platform.”  I’d credit that to a service like GMail, which is accessible as a web app, through POP and IMAP interfaces (essentially email APIs), several versions of mobile web app (WAP, static mobile HTML, Javascript-enabled HTML, iPhone-specific HTML), mobile Java app (for phones like Nokia’s E and N series), low-end web interface, and probably a bunch that I’m not aware of. I bet it even works over SMS. All I need to know is that GMail works on any device I’d happen to want to use it with.

And that’s the point. We are in the middle of a (wait for it) modular decomposition inflection point in personal computing.  Instead of the original vision of ubiquitous computing, in which computers are embedded in everyday objects and networked computing recedes into the background, we seem to be working with ever more explicit computing devices.  We have our pocket communicator, perhaps a work computer, maybe a home media server, a DVR, maybe a netbook perhaps? This is starting off in higher-income households, but the proliferation of domain-specific computing devices is infiltrating all levels.

EverNote is a particularly interesting example because while GMail took an existing function (social messaging) and ported it to every platform, EverNote is trying something much more ambitious.  From the way they describe themselves, they seem to be trying to allow you to capture, store and annotate anything that is of interest to you, and access it from any device you may wish to, even those not connected to a network at present. EverNote allows users to upload webpages, photos, to-do lists, etc. and view them on any computer or mobile device. On the iPhone, for example, users can take a photo and upload it on the go, check items off a to-do list, or start a new note. Then everything is synced to all versions, be they the website or the OS-specific downloadable application.  Users of the application can even use EverNote while offline, and then the changes are synced with the central server when the computer has network access again.  The platform is flexible enough that you could write a novel on it if you wanted.

I think EverNote is just the first. All sorts of things that we never thought of as “software” will mingle with functions we thought would never escape the desktop.  Our data will exist on individual devices, but also on servers coordinating the devices.  We’ll be able to get our work (or play) done even when we switch off the wifi (this generation’s “leave the phone off the hook”) and then sync it again when we find a signal.  We’ll be more connected than ever, and we’ll love it. Neal Stephenson was right.