Project Vision 21

Francisco Miraval

Personal names are a serious matter, or it was a serious matter until recently, when there were just a few reasons to change your name and the process was a long a tedious one, always under the constant supervision of some religious, civil, or judicial authority.

In fact, those authorities –be it priest or judges– represent two of the main reasons why people may decide to change their names: a religious conversion (or a new position inside a religious organization) or legal issues (including marriage, divorce, and even, in the case of artists, the use of pseudonyms.)

For example, Octavius changed his name to Augustus (“Divine One”) when he became the first Roman emperor. Two millennia later, Jorge Bergoglio adopted the name Francis when he became the Pope, the leader of the Catholic Church.

Religious conversions also cause people to change their names. After becoming a Christian, Saulus of Tarsus became known as Paul. And two thousand years later, after converting to Islam, Cassius Clay adopted the name Muhammad Ali.

There are other reasons to adopt a new name and to keep it, including personal success. Few people know who a Hungarian man called Erik Weisz was, because everybody knows him by his artistic name: Harry Houdini. In the same way, people may not have heard of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but many have read his books, written with the pen name Mark Twain.

In many cultures and societies, a person’s name changes if the person marries or divorces. In some cultures, the name will change when the person has children. From that point on, the person will be known as “the father / the mother of…” Other people are forced to change their names, for example, after being victims or witnesses of a crime, or because they are members of the family of a dictator.

However, all those reasons (historical, political, religious, cultural, social, legal, and artistic reasons) are practically disappearing in our narcissistic time of social networks when anybody can open an account using whatever name he/she wants and then anybody can change his/her name at any time and for reason at all (and in many cases as frequently as desired.)

When I enter my social networking sites, I see with increasing frequency names I do not recognize of people I am sure I never met before and then I discover those are people I know, but with a different name.

Sometimes, I tried to see if those persons have become emperors or leaders of a global religious group, or if they converted to another religion or they are launching an artistic career. So far, that has never been the case. It seems –based only on what they post in their social networks– that they just wanted to change their names.

Personal names were previously significant and almost always unchanged during the life of the bearer of that name. Nowadays, they are changed as easily and frequently as those “Hello, my name is…” we all use in social gatherings.