> That's not true in practice. Well, looks like your practice differs from mine then. Whenever I had to cooperate with someone, I'd ask them about their e-mail

> That's not true in practice. Well, looks like your practice differs from mine then. Whenever I had to cooperate with someone, I'd ask them about their e-mail, username or any other form of contact, so that I would have a "readily available channel", as you say. I don't see how asking for a username would not be normal; to me it's as much normal as asking for a name. > But it's always a song and dance to remember what their username is when I want to write to them. I don't use Twitter, but there are many places where lists of known people are kept - e.g. contacts on my phone or known e-mail addresses; and somehow in neither of such places I have trouble finding the right people; it is a feature of such lists to let me tag specific usernames (be it phone numbers or e-mails, to stick to these examples) with descriptions which sound familiar to me. These descriptions don't necessarily need to be real world names either - often it is easier for me to tag someone with a word describing shared interest or place I know them from, rather than using their real name, because often their last name would look completely unfamiliar to me anyway. > Your arguments seem to be based in a theoretical version of how the world works, not how modern social relationships actually function. On the other hand your arguments seem to be based on the narrow view of how your social relationships function, completely ignoring much wider spectrum of "modern social relationships"..