Digital Deception

Assignment 2: Choice 2

According to Nyberg, deception is the “the shrewd and sober art of showing and hiding which is meant to control what is and is not perceived, assumed or understood.” In the Carlson et al article, deception is explained as: “an intentional act that occurs when communicators control information in a message to create a particular effect. Using this definition, deception may take a variety of forms ranging from its most direct form, fabrication, to more subtle forms like half-truths, vagueness, equivocations, and concealments.” Deception is part of everyday life, and there are verbal, non-verbal, contextual and meta-clues available o help detect deception. Different media afford different levels of richness (Media Richness theory) and social presence (Social Presence theory).
In the case of computer mediated communication, however, non-verbal cues are not necessarily available. Depending on the type of CMC used — how many channels are afforded — there are various numbers (greater or fewer) of cues available. These cues not only change senders’ and receivers’ perceptions of communication, they change people’s abilities to deceive and detect deception. So, deception in CMC is different in that new techniques and ideas can or must be used in order to deceive or gain an advantage for deception.
It’s important to note that CMC deceivers now have new tricks, as this does change one’s ability to deceive and detect deception. I think that because CMC deceivers have new skill sets that make them good or bad at what they do, it makes people more wary of their deception. It’s now important to not only be able to control one’s self and regulate expression: having experience in the medium, especially with deception in the medium, is posited as being a potential positive for successful deception. Impression management through channels s also critical for success (Carosn et al.). But people seem to be catching onto this, and especially new users of CMC are likely to distrust anyone online, making deception in CMC possibly even harder than in FTF.
Regardless of how deception is carried out or if it’s successful, these changes do not make CMC deception fundamentally any different from the current definition of deception. For example, if you were hypothetically teleported into the 1940’s — phones were definitely not computers back then — and had to lie to someone over the phone, would you not be practicing deception? Changing the medium does not change the definition of the deception used, it merely extends the current one it into new avenues.
So in a sense, I see this as a bit of a combination between the old wine-new bottle and new wine – new bottle. It seems to me that the wine is the same, but — as with all things over time — the bottle is changing, and this in turn is going to change the taste of the wine (you know, the whole light filtration thing). Simply, I think that because CMC is a new media for deception, it’s going to change the ways we do things. But it’s still that same old deception, just in a different way.

posted by Josh P @ 11:45 AM