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Well, the origin of this is pretty simple: it seemed like a pretty frequent format on DailyKos (matt in nyc, Bill in Portland Maine, etc) so I just used it like this with my name and city.

As to internet personalities, my experience from meetups and YearlyKos is that poster's real personalities cannot be hidden from the forum - I was struck time and again by the profound identity between people's posts and their real life personalities. The real surprise was the physical world - looks, age, gender have all been unexpected for various persons.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Mon Dec 31st, 2007 at 05:32:55 AM EST
The real surprise was the physical world - looks, age, gender have all been unexpected for various persons.

I have found that to be universally true.  My work often involves telephone and/or email conversations with counterparts at other utilities whom I've never met in person.   And one of my long time hobbies is amateur radio, which again involves long distance communication with relative strangers.  In both cases, the occasional real time meetup invariably involves recalibrating a mental image that is different, sometimes wildly so, from the reality.

We all bleed the same color.

by budr on Mon Dec 31st, 2007 at 09:39:24 AM EST
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I don't use my first name, but Middletown is actually my home town, Muncie, Indiana, United States.

During the 1920s my hometown was part of the classic sociological work, the Middletown Studies.

Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture was primarily a look at changes in a small Midwest city between 1890 and 1925, the year the study was completed.

Although the book does not name the city (population: 38,000) in question, it was later revealed to be Muncie, Indiana.

The Lynds and their assistants used the "approach of the cultural anthropologist" (see field research and social anthropology), existing documents, statistics, interviews, and surveys to accomplish this task. The stated goal of the study was describe this small urban center as a unit which consists of "interwoven trends of behavior" (p. 3). Or put in more detail,

    "to present a dynamic, functional study of the contemporary life of this specific American community in the light of trends of changing behaviour observable in it during the last thirty-five years" (p. 6).

The book is written in an entirely descriptive tone, treating the citizens of Middletown in much the same way as an anthropologist from an industrialized nation might describe a non-industrial culture.

Muncie continues to be one of the places that pollsters and reporters go when they want to do an "average American city" story.  As far as how my online self and offline self caompare, my offline self is far less vocal.  It's sort of like my inner Hulk comes out.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

by ManfromMiddletown (manfrommiddletown at lycos dot com) on Mon Dec 31st, 2007 at 12:43:41 PM EST
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