Fewer lies by email
Each of us lies no less than 200 times per day, mainly on the phone; however, we lie less via email because it is recorded for eternity. But what is a lie?
A quarter of our speaking lives, perhaps even a bit more, is spent on lying, according to a recent Cornell University study.
Another study, conducted in England, says that people lie no less than 200 times per day.
According to the Cornell study, telephone conversations are responsible for a significant portion of this phenomenon. We lie more on the phone than face-to-face. When our body language isn't there to fail us, our tongues are much freer.
Some people speak more on the phone than face-to-face. Good friends can go years without seeing one another, yet they maintain a deep connection by phone.
Many of my best friends fell in love on the phone. Some even use it to enhance their sex lives: He's in the army, she's at home; he's on a business trip while she's watching the kids; she's at work all day and he's at home in the afternoon; he's married to another woman and she's married to another man.
Relationship by the written word
The more our telephone lives expand, the more we lie. But surprisingly, it is the internet that is slowing down this trend.
The internet threatens our TV time, our telephone time, and our face-to-face time. Some people barely leave the house because of the internet.
Their lives in chat rooms, on-line game sites, surfing, blogging and instant messaging are nice, pleasant, varied and more intriguing.
The internet is first and foremost a relationship by the written word. The Cornell study found that we lie less via email because it is recorded for all eternity.
It's hard to lie when every word becomes testimony. Everything is there in black-and-white. By email, we lie just 14 percent of the time, about half as much as we do when speaking.
Carnival of masks
But this most impressive statistic contradicts what we know about the internet. The internet is a platform for anonymity. A great many blogs, forums, chat rooms, and even email addresses are a smokescreen for our true identities.
It is a carnival of masks, as Brenda Danet, a researcher from Hebrew University, says. Old people pretend to be young, married to be single, ugly people to be beautiful, fat people to be skinny, and complete failures to have the Midas touch.
How do we resolve these facts with the push to lie less in writing?
The answer is in the difference between lying and fabrication. Hidden identities are not necessarily lies, and fabrications about looks, age, personality, facial appearance and size of sexual organs are not necessarily misleading.
Fabrication can be innocent fantasy, role playing. A fiction writer is not a liar, nor is an actor. Fantasizing about a successful career is not a lie in-and-of-itself; fantasy about a woman who will never come to be is not necessarily misleading. Purim is not a holiday of lies.
Fabrication is an interesting and pleasing addition provided to life by imagination. As long as it is presented as a fabrication, or develops in a place known as a fabrication area, such as a masked ball, it is not a lie. Internet enables us to fabricate ourselves more, but not necessarily to lie more.
Avinoam Ben-Zeev is a philosopher. He may be contacted with moral dilemmas on relations and love via email.
'Old people pretend to be young, married to be single, ugly people to be beautiful'
Photo: Visual/Photos
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