oTHE HONESTY VIRUS By Clive Thompson

Everyone tells a little white lie now and then. But a Cornell professor
recently claimed to have established the truth of a curious proposition: We
fib less frequently when we're online than when we're talking in person.
Jeffrey Hancock asked 30 of his undergraduates to record all of their
communications -- and all of their lies -- over the course of a week. When
he tallied the results, he found that the students had mishandled the truth
in about one-quarter of all face-to-face conversations, and in a whopping
37 percent of phone calls. But when they went into cyberspace, they turned
into Boy Scouts: only 1 in 5 instant-messaging chats contained a lie, and
barely 14 percent of e-mail messages were dishonest.

Obviously, you can't make sweeping generalizations about society on the
basis of college students' behavior. (And there's also something rather odd
about asking people to be honest about how often they lie.) But still,
Hancock's results were intriguing, not least because they upend some of our
primary expectations about life on the Net.

Wasn't cyberspace supposed to be the scary zone where you couldn't trust
anyone? Back when the Internet first came to Main Street, pundits worried
that the digital age would open the floodgates of deception. Since anyone
could hide behind an anonymous Hotmail address or chat-room moniker, Net
users, we were warned, would be free to lie with impunity. Parents panicked
and frantically cordoned off cyberspace from their children, under the
assumption that anyone lurking out there in the ether was a creep until
proved otherwise. And to a certain extent, the fear seemed justified.
According to Psych 101, we're more likely to lie to people when there's
distance between us -- and you can't get much more distant than a hot-chat
buddy in Siberia who calls himself 0minous-1.

Why were those fears unfounded? What it is about online life that makes us
more truthful? It's simple: We're worried about being busted. In "real"
life, after all, it's actually pretty easy to get away with spin. If you
tell a lie to someone at a cocktail party or on the phone, you can always
backtrack later and claim you said no such thing. There's probably no one
recording the conversation, unless you're talking to Linda Tripp (in which
case you've clearly got other problems).

On the Internet, though, your words often come back to haunt you. The
digital age is tough on its liars, as a seemingly endless parade of
executives are learning to their chagrin. Today's titans of industry are
laid low not by ruthless competitors but by prosecutors gleefully waving
transcripts of old e-mail, filled with suggestions of subterfuge. Even
Microsoft was tripped up by old e-mail messages, and you would figure its
employees would know better. This isn't a problem for only corporate
barons. We all read the headlines; we know that in cyberspace our words
never die, because machines don't forget. "It's a cut-and-paste culture,"
as Hancock put it (though he told me that on the phone, so who knows?
There's only a 63 percent chance he really meant it).

Indeed, the axiom that machines never forget is built into the very format
of e-mail -- consider that many e-mail programs automatically "quote" your
words when someone replies to your message. Every day, my incoming e-mail
reminds me of the very words I wrote yesterday, last week or even months
ago. It's as if the gotcha politics of Washington were being brought to
bear on our everyday lives. Every time I finish an e-mail message, I pause
for a few seconds to reread it before I hit "send" just to make sure I
haven't said something I'll later regret. It's as if I'm constantly
awaiting the subpoena.

And it's not only e-mail that records our deeds for future scrutiny. Before
going on a first date, people Google their partners to see what they can
learn. Mobile phones take photographs. The other day I saw an ad promoting
the world's first "terabyte" hard drive for consumers' use: it can store
two years' worth of continuous music, or about 200 million pieces of
average-size e-mail. In a couple of years, that sort of hardware will be
standard issue in even the cheapest Dell computer. We are facing an age in
which virtually nothing will be forgotten.

Maybe this helps explain why television programs like "C.S.I." have become
so popular. They're all about revealing the sneaky things that people do.
We watch with fascination and unease as scientists inspect the tiniest of
clues -- a stray hair on a car seat, a latent fingerprint on a CD-ROM.
After you've seen high-tech cops rake over evidence from a crime scene with
ultraviolet light and luminol and genetic sequencers enough times, you get
the message: Watch out, punk. We've got files on you. Forensic science has
become the central drama of pop culture, and its popularity may well
increase our anxieties about technology.

So no wonder we're so careful to restrict our lying to low-fi environments.
We have begun to behave like mobsters, keenly suspicious of places that
might be bugged, conducting all of our subterfuge in loud restaurants and
lonely parks, where we can meet one on one.

Still, it's not only the fear of electronic exposure that drives us to tell
the truth. There's something about the Internet that encourages us to spill
our guts, often in rather outrageous ways. Psychologists have noticed for
years that going online seems to have a catalytic effect on people's
personalities. The most quiet and reserved people may become deranged
loudmouths when they sit behind the keyboard, staying up until dawn and
conducting angry debates on discussion boards with total strangers. You can
usually spot the newbies in any discussion group because they're the ones
WRITING IN ALL CAPS -- they're tripped out on the Internet's heady
combination of geographic distance and pseudo-invisibility.

One group of psychologists found that heated arguments -- so-called
flame-war fights, admittedly a rather fuzzy category -- were far more
common in online discussion boards than in comparable face-to-face
communications. Another researcher, an Open University U.K. psychologist
named Adam Joinson, conducted an experiment in which his subjects chatted
online and off. He found that when people communicated online, they were
more likely to offer up personal details about themselves without any
prompting. Joinson also notes that the Samaritans, a British crisis-line
organization, has found that 50 percent of those who write in via e-mail
express suicidal feelings, compared with only 20 percent of those who call
in. This isn't because Net users are more suicidally depressed than people
offline. It's just that they're more comfortable talking about it --
"disinhibited," as the mental-health profession would say.

Who knew? When the government created the Internet 30 years ago, it thought
it was building a military tool. The Net was supposed to help the nation
survive a nuclear attack. Instead, it has become a vast arena for
collective therapy -- for a mass outpouring of what we're thinking and
feeling. I spend about an hour every day visiting blogs, those lippy Web
sites where everyone wants to be a pundit and a memoirist. (Then I spend
another hour writing my own blog and adding to the cacophony.) Stripped of
our bodies, it seems, we become creatures of pure opinion.

Our impulse to confess via cyberspace inverts much of what we think about
honesty. It used to be that if you wanted to know someone -- to really know
and trust them -- you arranged a face-to-face meeting. Our culture still
fetishizes physical contact, the shaking of hands, the lubricating
chitchat. Executives and politicians spend hours flying across the country
merely for a five-minute meeting, on the assumption that even a few seconds
of face time can cut through the prevarications of letters and legal
contracts. Remember when George W. Bush first met Vladimir Putin, gazed
into his eyes and said he could trust him because he'd acquired "a sense of
his soul"?

So much for that. If Bush really wanted the straight goods, he should have
met the guy in an AOL chat room. And maybe, in the long run, that's the
gratifying news. As more and more of our daily life moves online, we could
find ourselves living in an increasingly honest world, or at least one in
which lies have ever more serious consequences. Bush himself can't put old
statements about W.M.D. behind him partly because so many people are
forwarding his old speeches around on e-mail or posting them on Web sites.
With its unforgiving machine memory, the Internet might turn out to be the
unlikely conscience of the world.



New York Times March 21, 2004



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/magazine/21ESSAY.html?


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