The author was a member and participant observer of a community that was initially exclusively based in online interactions. Over time, the community developed several regular offline interactions as well as a rich and extensive set of online interactive communication spaces. Herein, the author explores the symbolic meanings of members’ practices on choosing names for their initial and ongoing self-presentations to the community. These practices are discussed with regard to the matching of online to offline (so-called virtual vs. so-called real life ) symbolic identities or statuses such as age, gender, race, geography, and occupation. The idea that meanings emerging from everyday interaction are discovered through close observation and intimate familiarity with participants’ cultural settings are explored in an Internet setting. The author concludes that a rendition of the online persona as inherently less truthful—or at least less dense/rich/full—than offline presentations is problematic at best.
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