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This just in: the Internet is filled with liars and exaggerators. Apparently that little nugget of wisdom was news to Optimum Research, a UK-based research firm which needed to survey around 2,000 people living in England to figure this out, the Telegraph reports.
"Modern technologies, such as smartphones, social networking, and instant messaging have been hailed as innovations in the way people interact, removing obstacles to conversation and allowing for openness of discourse," said Glenn Wilson, a psychologist. "However, we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don't have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language."
To be fair, the survey was conducted on behalf of Direct Line, an insurance firm in the UK. But whatever, the point here is that in case there was ever any doubt, we now have empirical evidence that people take on a different persona online than they do in person. The study focused on mostly social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook, and only 20 percent of the respondents said they were more honest when posting tweets or sending text messages.
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Lhot
October 29, 2010 at 8:56am
...A Fire Upon the Deep, copywrite 1992, Vernor Vinge (as far as I know) FIRST coined the phrase: The Net of a Million Lies. File this away in your archives MaxPC, so in a few years you will have a record of who first coined said phrase, for an article in a future issue. :D
