The New York Times
ESSAY
The Honesty Virus
By CLIVE THOMPSON
This is an incredibly interesting article, that draws the conclusion that people are more truthful online than in person or on the phone. I’ve highlighted the most interesting parts below.
The author’s last two paragraphs are astonishing…yet he seems to be on the right path. I certainly agree that I can get to know someone just as well, maybe even better, by working with them virtually.
- Our impulse to confess via cyberspace inverts much of what we think about honesty. It used to be that if you wanted to know someone -- to really know and trust them -- you arranged a face-to-face meeting. Our culture still fetishizes physical contact, the shaking of hands, the lubricating chitchat. Executives and politicians spend hours flying across the country merely for a five-minute meeting, on the assumption that even a few seconds of face time can cut through the prevarications of letters and legal contracts. Remember when George W. Bush first met Vladimir Putin, gazed into his eyes and said he could trust him because he'd acquired ''a sense of his soul''?
So much for that. If Bush really wanted the straight goods, he should have met the guy in an AOL chat room. And maybe, in the long run, that's the gratifying news. As more and more of our daily life moves online, we could find ourselves living in an increasingly honest world, or at least one in which lies have ever more serious consequences. Bush himself can't put old statements about W.M.D. behind him partly because so many people are forwarding his old speeches around on e-mail or posting them on Web sites. With its unforgiving machine memory, the Internet might turn out to be the unlikely conscience of the world.
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March 21, 2004
The New York Times
ESSAY
The Honesty Virus
By CLIVE THOMPSON
