do you lie to people more often on the internet or cell phone?

[karyn]

from yahoo

Gadgets seen as best way to tell white lies Thu Dec 28, 9:43 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - More than four out of five people admit to telling little white lies at least once a day and the preferred way of being "economical with the truth" is to use technology such as cell phones, texts and e-mails, a survey on Thursday said.

The research by UK pollsters 72 Point found that "techno-treachery" was widespread with nearly 75 percent of people saying gadgets like Blackberrys made it easier to fib.

Just over half of respondents said using gadgets made them feel less guilty when telling a lie than doing it face to face, the study on behalf of financial services group Friends Provident found.

The workplace was a favorite location for fibbing with 67 percent of the 1,487 respondents admitting they had lied at work.

The top lie was pretending to be ill (43 percent) followed by saying work had been completed when it hadn't (23 percent). Worryingly for bosses 18 percent said they lied to hide a big mistake.

But, employers were not the only ones on the receiving end of disingenuous statements.

Just over 40 percent said they had lied to their family or partner. Key topics to lie about were; buying new clothes or the cost of them (37 percent), how good someone looked in something (35 percent) how much they had eaten (35 percent) and drunk (31 percent) and how much they weighed (32 percent).

The survey found that while people were dishonest, most told lies with the best intentions and to spare others' feelings.

But with hi-tech gadgets on the top of many Christmas lists this year maybe everyone should cynically brace themselves for a few fibs in the New Year.

[Zoe]

Neither I'm a terrible Lier!

[Amelia G]

I don't think people really lie more online in a personal way. Like I don't think someone I know in real life is more likely to tell me a lie via email than in person. But I think strangers are more likely to present wholesale fiction in a kind of roleplaying way. Like a twenty-five-year-old guy pretending to be a teenage girl and having cybersex in character or a corporate shill pretending to be a fan of some band that they wouldn't care about if they were not being paid.

[Mindgames]

...or a corporate shill pretending to be a fan of some band that they wouldn't care about if they were not being paid.

It's not that a label's marketing department lies more online than they do IRL, it's that when the industry uses embedded avatars you notice it more - seeing a character upping a band, or a brand, is a lot more obvious if they seem to be having a semi-personal conversation with you, and people also tend to react more strongly against it. I know the music industry has a rep for it but embedding is everywhere on the Internet these days - Amazon have said in the past they think a good 25% of all the book reviews are done by people with a vested interest and a lot of the computer and gadgetry e-zines wouldn't stay afloat without promotional tie-ins behind the scenes.

Nobody ever thinks that the actors in a TV commercial actually use the products they're selling (you do know George Foreman doesn't use one, don't you?), but it's accepted as just part of modern society that people get paid to promote stuff on TV they don't personally give a flying raccoon for. Doing the same job in a chatroom is still a problem though.

I guess it's the fact that online interaction is so easy to fake - it's a walk in the park to embed yourself as long as you have a grasp of the persona you're trying to be, and with only typing people have a niggly little voice behind their shoulder saying "this dude could be anyone.. Hell he may not even be a dude..." - so when you unmask someone I think it gives you a little kick of self-satisfaction. It's getting progressively more difficult now that people expect A/V as well as typing (you can all pretend to be a teenage girl on a forum, but those of you with beards and beer bellies will hit trouble if we ask to see your webcam!) and for most of us that's a good thing - cuts down the crime, helps people actually relax when they're talking online - but it also means that the marketing teams and *********s of the world are in an arms war to embed themselves even deeper.

mG

[Amelia G]

It's not that a label's marketing department lies more online than they do IRL, it's that when the industry uses embedded avatars you notice it more - seeing a character upping a band, or a brand, is a lot more obvious if they seem to be having a semi-personal conversation with you, and people also tend to react more strongly against it. I know the music industry has a rep for it but embedding is everywhere on the Internet these days - Amazon have said in the past they think a good 25% of all the book reviews are done by people with a vested interest and a lot of the computer and gadgetry e-zines wouldn't stay afloat without promotional tie-ins behind the scenes.

Nobody ever thinks that the actors in a TV commercial actually use the products they're selling (you do know George Foreman doesn't use one, don't you?), but it's accepted as just part of modern society that people get paid to promote stuff on TV they don't personally give a flying raccoon for. Doing the same job in a chatroom is still a problem though.

I guess it's the fact that online interaction is so easy to fake - it's a walk in the park to embed yourself as long as you have a grasp of the persona you're trying to be, and with only typing people have a niggly little voice behind their shoulder saying "this dude could be anyone.. Hell he may not even be a dude..." - so when you unmask someone I think it gives you a little kick of self-satisfaction. It's getting progressively more difficult now that people expect A/V as well as typing (you can all pretend to be a teenage girl on a forum, but those of you with beards and beer bellies will hit trouble if we ask to see your webcam!) and for most of us that's a good thing - cuts down the crime, helps people actually relax when they're talking online - but it also means that the marketing teams and *********s of the world are in an arms war to embed themselves even deeper.

mG

For some reason, probably pollyannaism, it took me a while to realize that a lot of the most vocal "fans" of a lot of things online were wholly fictitious. I think I'm resentful of it because it is a game I don't want to play, but I have to deal with competitors who become competitors by playing. For example, I know I look at more than one web site during any given day. So I don't think someone is my competitor because they also own web sites. Part of the point of the web is, in my view, precisely that it is, or at least should be, a web of interlocking pieces of media. Blue Blood has been running its banner exchange program since the late nineties and I've discovered lots of sites I enjoy just for its existence. But when you get the fake fan embedding thing going, things can get to be a drag because there is a lot of "Fuck X! I am a fan of Y and true fans of Y hate X!" Of course, if I call someone on this nonsense, they will swear it is just overzealous and out-of-control fans, even though any professional knows that is laughable.

I did local crew for Kiss many years ago and I was stunned by how many knockout gorgeous girls would be in the audience. I jokingly, at the time, described it as being like they must either bring them with them or invoke them with demon spells on arrival. Now that I (a) live in Los Angeles and (b) am more aware of shill marketing from its egregious abuse online, I realize that there is no way I would not have known local chicks who looked like that and there were too many of them to have been girlfriends or wives. Which leaves the likelihood that they were paid fans.

At a certain point, awareness of this type of dishonest promo makes it hard to take any recommendation seriously. I used to love restaurant reviews, but now I am acutely aware that they are often written by either the restaurant or the restaurant's competitors.

I believe the music industry and the political arena are two of the true pioneers of fake shill marketing, but snake oil is surely not new.

The difference between some actress telling me to buy cheap Covergirl foundation and a professional street-teamer telling me a book on Amazon is good is that the power of the internet medium is supposed to be getting to hear what actual real people really think. If we evolve to the point where we accept that all positivity is probably secretly a paid endorsement, do we, as a society and as individuals, truly get to appreciate anything any more? Does acceptance of shilling mean agreement with the notion that nothing is truly higher quality or more original or more interesting or more tasty etc. than anything else? Does it mean we don't really get to like anything and we don't really get to feel a kinship with others who claim to like what we like?

[ScarlettSin]

Apparently there are quite a few ppl who enjoy lying when on the internet. Though I'm sure alot of it has to do with whom one is lying to. I've noticed people are more likely to lie to their parents when on the phone and ppl they've never met on the internet. Really jsut bad form all around.

S

[xssve]

I try not to lie on the internet, as it's my primary form of social interaction - and what is the point of being deceptive to people who don't know you and you'll probobly never meet? The relative absence of social controls and peer pressure actually create rare opportunity to say what's really on your mind.

I'll tell a white lie if it makes the story a little better, or if it's just none of your damn business.

And the cell phone thing is out of hand - I see enitire groups of people out together, ignoring each other and each having a seperate conversation over their cell phones - is it me or is this just strange?

[Mindgames]

The difference between some actress telling me to buy cheap Covergirl foundation and a professional street-teamer telling me a book on Amazon is good is that the power of the internet medium is supposed to be getting to hear what actual real people really think. If we evolve to the point where we accept that all positivity is probably secretly a paid endorsement, do we, as a society and as individuals, truly get to appreciate anything any more? Does acceptance of shilling mean agreement with the notion that nothing is truly higher quality or more original or more interesting or more tasty etc. than anything else? Does it mean we don't really get to like anything and we don't really get to feel a kinship with others who claim to like what we like?

"You don't find customers - you make them", said Palmer in the 1840's. People have been using bias to sell stuff since the Roman Empire, and way before that if you open a can of worms and call religion 'marketing', and the freedom of speech and equality of presence offered by the Web makes it impossible to avoid. The idea that the Web gives a voice to the man in the street is still perfectly true, but 30% of the men in the street take a salary because they sell something. I think that the 'system' still works if you look from far enough above it, though - a product can fake a few reviews here and there, but if something pulls up 50,000 hits on Google you have to expect 90% of them are unconnected to the manufacturer. Blogging has helped, as it's a lot easier to tell if someone is running an agenda when they only mention a product once in a thousand entries, or rave on about it every other week.

Marketing online and offline uses the concept of return on investment, and if I wanted to over-hype a band there's no way it'd make commercial sense to create a million fake ******* accounts - the bare minimum to get what you want is all you can usually get past the CFO. It's the same with reviews and ad space - BB appears on many places but it's targeted sensibly. You'd never return profit on the Google adword "sex" and the click throughs from a random mention on a forum for French organic cheese producers is going to be insane, so that's the way to beat the game - if the review is far enough removed from where you'd expect it to be, then it becomes more likely to be accurate. If it's on a site that has a large and unmoderated membership and it's gone unchallenged, it's safer to trust. If I can see any possible flow of cash to the person speaking I'll pretty much ignore it and move on.

I certainly don't think that being exposed to the game means you have to be either a pessimist or a patsy - the game isn't perfect and with a little effort you can see behind it. Things can still be better, or tastier, but it's really only your opinion that counts in the end - if reviews, accurate or otherwise, were all you needed to rely on then we'd all be using the exact same brands.

There's no way to avoid seeing the game played in front of you, as anywhere it's not found to exploit will be assimilated within hours - there's more money spent by companies on marketing products within Second Life than is spent by individuals playing the game, but people seem happy enough to just steer through it and carry on. What bothers me are the people who don't understand the game, or even know it exists - I regularly come across perfectly mature adults who've got a Truman Show view of the Web and blindly accept everything they read unless it starts with "THIS IS AN ADVERTISEMENT" in big pink letters along the top - maybe we need to teach cynicism in high school, or maybe the world needs cannon fodder to absorb the crap before it gets to us.

mG

[LoraLie]

I think I'm a little too honest online sometimes. I need to learn to hold my tongue. or my fingers, whatever haha.

and I dont relaly lie on the phone either

I hate lying. I only really lie to my parents.