The World Wide Web of Lies

 
By Jillian Jenée

 

Sitting on your couch waiting for the guy you met online to pick you up for your first date, you gaze romantically at his profile picture. You “ooh” and “ahh” over his big smile and perfectly straight, white teeth as well as his gorgeous blonde hair, and big, baby blue eyes. You blush as you scroll down and see a muscular torso, tall stature, and huge bulge in his Hanes underwear. You close your eyes and drift off into a dream of what your lives will be like in ten years when you’re married with kids.

Suddenly, the doorbell rings. You jump up from the couch and without a thought, open the door and there he stands — a five-foot-tall, sixty-year-old man with two strands of grey hair laying flat atop his head, his dentures hanging partly out of his mouth and the skin on his face drooping far under his chin. He hands you a bouquet of red roses and says, “You look even better in person.”                 

He pulls out a flip phone from the front of his fanny pack and shows you the naked picture you thought you sent to the hottie last night. “This is you, isn’t it?” Old Man River asks with a huge smile.

Thinking that this has to be a cruel joke one of your girlfriends is playing on you as an April Fools’ prank, you look around outside for that tall, handsome, blonde hottie, but no one else is there. It’s just you and Old Man River.
                                       
This is not a mere hypothetical scenario. “Catfish,” the MTV reality show about online relationships, reveals these kinds of situations every week. (And as we all probably know by now, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o recently fell victim to a fake-girlfriend hoax.)                                                                                                  
The freedom and anonymity of the internet makes us all susceptible to scammers.

          

I cannot even count how many times I’ve talked to guys online only to find that they are completely different from the people they claim to be. These perverts change their names, steal pictures from random people on Facebook, and lie about their lives. Some of them even go as far as to offer you money for sex.

           

Online communication can be highly dangerous because sometimes, no matter what people tell you, there is no way of knowing if it’s true. You may find yourself sharing an intimate connection and starting a close relationship with one impostor after another. Social media can cast a spell and evoke trust in people you’ve never physically met. Before you know it, you may find yourself submitting to your cyber-date’s request for R-rated pictures of yourself. This lack of inhibition online lends credibility to the saying “out of sight, out of mind.”

As “Catfish” shows, many cyber daters aren’t who they appear to be, lying about their job, hometown, age, and even their gender and ethnicity. 
                                                                                        
But don’t let that completely discourage you from engaging in online communication. If you use it well, it can be quite beneficial. Talking to friends, teachers, and distant relatives when face-to-face communication is unavailable is completely safe and helps keep those relationships alive. Many websites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. also have privacy policies that you can set up to fit your needs, so that only the people you want to see your profiles, tweets, and statuses can see them. Being social online can also be a great way of networking and making new friends.                                  

Just make sure you are careful about the information you send out to people and be wary that the Internet is accessible to anyone. Once you put something out there, you can’t take it back. As a character in the film “The Social Network” says, “The Internet isn’t written in pencil, it’s written in ink.”
                     
Be sure to listen to Media Matters this Saturday, 11 a.m., on WCRD, as the organization will talk about the implications of such online communication and if social media outlets can ever produce true reflections of their users.