A3: I'm Naked & I'm Not Lying (in CMC)
As we’ve come to realize, people lie everyday in every medium of communication —face-to-face, e-mail, phone, instant message, and even in the age-old art of hand-written letters. Ultimately, the medium itself doesn’t matter; lies will still be told and people will still be deceived. As we have also seen, however, the medium does matter when we look at the characteristics of the lie. As Hancock et al. pointed out in their study, telephone conversations had the highest frequency of lies per social interaction while e-mail held the lowest. Such differences are generally attributed to the pertinent features and characteristics of the communication mediums in question. By extension then, since each medium must have properties which allow for the differences, lies and their characteristics will differ from medium to medium.For our project, we propose to look at the distribution of deceptive messages throughout a computer mediated communication conversation. Are lies more frequent in the beginning of conversation, the middle or the end? Do they get told more often around certain points of an exchange? There is some existing linguistic research on where lies occur in normal FtF conversation, but would those predictions hold true in the online world? Like so many other properties of deception, we initially believe that it will prove to be different in a CMC medium. We hope to examine the existing research in light of CMC theories and make a few predictions on the matter. From our hypotheses we expect to be able to suggest a study by which our predictions can be either supported or refuted.
By further examining the differing characteristics of lies in dissimilar mediums we can get closer to answering the “old wine, new bottle” question. If the distribution of lies proves to be similar between the two mediums, then it looks like deception really could be nothing more than a “new bottle.” However, if the distribution appears differently, as we expect it may, then it would lend credence to the idea that CMC deception really is further separated from deception in other mediums and could be considered new wine in a new bottle.
BARRETT AMOS & JOSH PERLIN
posted by Josh P @ 1:12 AM
1 Comments:
Good job coming up with a great topic. You focus your ideas in essentially uncharted territory, which is provocative and interesting. I think your inital goal of learning about the frequency of deception online is an important question, but a subsequent and seemingly necessary follow-up is WHY deception occurs more often either at the beginning, middle, or end of conversations. Cameron introduced the basics of interacting with friends and the implications that may have on when you lie, but more basic potential hypotheses would be (I'm sure there are more and better than what I'm about to offer) : people lie early on to spark a conversation or generate interest, people lie in the middle to prolong an already-existing conversation or for the sake of exaggeration, or people lie at the end of conversations because they run out of things to say desire to seem in agreement. I think you can tie in some existing research with the "why" pretty neatly to fit in with your idea.
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