Everyone Has an Online Nickname

Everyone Has an Online Nickname began with an ordinary ride-hailing journey. The driver was a middle-aged man with greying hair, and we did not speak during the trip. When I paid at the end of the journey, I noticed that his username was “Star 🌟🌟🌟.” The unexpected relationship between his appearance, his occupation, and this playful name led me to pay closer attention to the personal imagination contained within online nicknames.

A person’s legal name is usually chosen by others and given at birth. Online, people are able to name themselves again. A nickname may come from a song lyric, an emotion, a memory, or an imagined version of the self; it may also be chosen casually. It cannot fully explain a person, yet it offers a small clue beyond appearance, occupation, and official identity.

After this encounter, whenever I used a ride-hailing service, I photographed the driver at the beginning of the journey and saved the payment screen showing their nickname at the end. I then placed the two images together. The project includes names that translate as “Longing for Tomorrow,” “Who Should Control the Soul,” “Meow Meow,” “Defiant,” “On the Road,” “Who Am I,” “The Wind Makes My Balls Cold,” and “Pay and Get Out.” Expressions of seriousness, romance, humour, and uncertainty become connected to the ordinary, specific individuals seated behind the wheel.

I did not ask the drivers to explain their chosen names, so the relationship between portrait and nickname remains open. Viewers can only make associations between a face and a self-selected identity. The name may reflect a personal history or a momentary impulse; this unverifiable distance forms part of the work.

In platform-mediated urban life, drivers, passengers, vendors, and customers often encounter one another through functional roles: service provider, order, account, or payment recipient. A nickname appearing on a screen introduces a small trace of individuality into these standardised exchanges. Everyone Has an Online Nickname records these brief moments of disclosure, in which a person reduced by the system to a professional role continues to preserve imagination, emotion, and humour through a name of their own choosing.