ne tr ue onlin e lden t it. Technology writer Nicole Lee has five accounts on Twitter, two on Instagram and one on Facebook - and , she says, a different identity on each of them. She uses some of her accounts to focus on specific topics. Other accounts are a kind of joke, like one where she pretended to be tweeting for a hair salon, just to make people laugh. Does having several different online identities make her a bit strange? Not according to author and social-media researcher danah boyd (who prefers her name to be written without capitals). According to boyd, for almost the whole history of the internet people have had more than one online face. "Different sites, different audiences, different purposes," she says. 'I interviewed a young person last week who was very clear about the need for multiple profiles," boyd continues. This person used one social-media platform to share serious information about current events, another to share photographs with classmates, a third to communicate with "everyone she's ever met"and text messages to chat to close friends and family. Each platform, it seems, showed a different side of her personality or a different part of is her life. In her article Having multiple online identities is more normal than you think, Lee quotes an un-named Twitter user who strongly believes that most people have more than one identity, saying The life I lead in front of my family members is not the life I lead when I'm with my friends, which isn't the life I lead __ online." Lee's colleague 20 Mallory Johns also has different social-media accounts that show different sides of her personality. Some are more serious while others,such as an Instagram account that's just about French fries, are just for fun. She set it up, she says, because 1 thought my friends would get sick of all mv.food nics' How does our online behaviour compare with real life? With regard to identity.