The following was a reply in my post entitled "The Secret of Superman's Identity" but grew to such proportions that I feel it merits a thread of its own.
Regarding the plausibility of the secret identity, I have two anecdotes from my own life which provide contrasting examples.
When I was in undergrad, I was the head staff writer for our student paper (my choice to engage in journalism having been inspired entirely by Superman). My best friend at the time was himself the editor. In addition to the school-sanctioned paper, we had also, beginning in the first weeks of freshman year, been the two main contributors to the underground paper, a satirical gazette inspired heavily by The Onion (both of which, coincidentally, were founded in Wisconsin by men named Christopher Johnson). In the four years we contributed to both no one ever discovered that the writers of the "real" paper were one and the same as the ones behind the more popular and prolific "joke" paper.
Needless to say, maintaining the secret behind the underground paper required us to engage in many of the tropes associated with the double life of a superhero. Secret identities in the form of pen-names were a given (my primary being "Kent Clarkson"). However, distribution, which consisted of dead drops in the middle of the night at high-traffic areas of campus (as well as the campus safety headquarters and the university president's office, just to prove I could break in without getting caught), required a combination of stealth and disguise.
On one occasion, as a deliberate test of the secret identity trope, I really went all out while doing a distribution run: I shaved my mustache for the first time at college, donned the glasses normally reserved as as a back-up to my contacts, and dressed in winter apparel, including a beanie (it was fall of freshman year, and no one had seen me dress in such garb yet, but it was also not inappropriate for the climate and season). I even went so far as to change my mannerisms, deliberately channeling a shy and insecure demeanor.
The result was this: after completing my task, I approached my best friend and his girlfriend (now wife) in the library. Even as they talked with me they did not recognize me in the slightest. I had the pleasure of taking off my glasses in a dramatic reveal deliberately invoking Superman, knowing my experiment had proved successful.
I thought this had settled the matter conclusively until about three weeks ago. I had walked to one of the bars down the street for their first ever karaoke night, ready to rock the room with my rendition of Big & Rich's Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy) (which, along with the opening line of the Steve Miller Band's The Joker, was the inspiration behind my username). Seeing that the event room downstairs was a ghost-town save for myself and the disk jockey, I returned upstairs to kill some time at the bar.
I pulled up a stool next to a blonde couple in their mid-twenties and ordered a cider. Immediately the woman turned to me, first in compliment of my cowboy hat, and then to ask where I hail from (as per the song, I'm the only John Wayne in this town). I explained my nomadic tendencies and began to enumerate some of the places I've called home: Missouri, Maryland, Wisconsin, Carolina. This led to a twenty minute conversation regarding my old town of Wilmington, where by coincidence she and her boyfriend were looking into moving.
I had deliberately omitted the fact that I had previously lived for many years in the state in which we were currently conversing. It was not relevant to the discussion, and would make no difference to individuals I had never met before. However, after fifteen minutes or so, I began to suspect the truth about her boyfriend, and about five minute later he had figures it out as well. He asked me with a look of recognition on his face, "What's your name?" At this point, I had no choice but to respond, "Matthew, which would make you Kevin." We then explained to his confused girlfriend that we had known each other from kindergarten through high school, my mother having babysat him and his mother having been a teacher at our school.
He had changed little apart from a bit more facial hair, so my deduction of his identity was no great feat of detective work, but it was a genuine shock to me that he was able to recognize a transformation that would put Clark Kent to shame. In the more than ten years since last we'd seen one another I had grown out a mustache and goatee, began to shave my head daily, donned the aforementioned cowboy hat, and put significant muscle mass on my previously slim physique.
Yet despite the years and the totality of my transformation, far more than thick-framed glasses and slicked-back hair, an individual from my past was able to piece together that "The Cowboy of College Ave" was one and the same as mild-mannered Matthew in all of twenty minutes. In all the variations of the Superman mythos, the greatest span of time between Clark disappearing from society and him reappearing under the duel-guises of bespectacled reporter and costumed hero is a mere twelve years, as per the '78 Christopher Reeve movie. The first time a decent picture of the Man of Steel graced the front page of the Daily Planet, half the residents of Smallville would put two and two together.
Modern technology has only exacerbated the problem; photo-recognition software employed by the likes of Facebook and other tech conglomerates would constantly tag photos of Superman as Clark and vice versa. And social media presence is not even a voluntary matter in this day and age. I've gone to parties in which girls I'd never met recognized me from Instagram before I ever had an account through such. Indeed, my Facebook profile picture is a candid shot that a friend came across on a Student Life webpage to a college I don't even attend.
What's the point of all this long-winded pontificating? I'm under no illusions here; I know that there's nothing in the least realistic about Superman's secret identity as Clark Kent. Yet despite such, I still believe with all my heart that the trope is so iconic, such a powerful metaphor, such a fantastic notion, that despite its implausibility it should never be permanently written out of the character of Superman. For all the changing, fickle tastes of the comic book audience, this is something of enduring value that should never be discarded.
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