Note: These are running notes for LIFT ‘08; for more complete blog coverage check out the official LIFT Conference blog or LunchOverIP. 

Genevieve Bell says that people on average tell “between 6 -20 lies per day”. 

Which of course makes me think: what have lied about today?  Well, I told my 3-year old nephew that if he didn’t finish his yogurt that he’d never play professional football (although the truth is that his genetic disposition will likely be the primary cause of his future career disappointment, rather than the vanilla yogurt).  I also told him that the batteries of his Lion King reader book had died.  This was a total lie, because in fact I removed a battery when the bugger was in the bathroom, rendering the book mute (although in my own defense, I truly feel this was a lie necessary to protect the both of us, as I was afraid of what I’d do if I heard the “Circle of Life” song one more time today).  And I told my mother I was relaxing and taking the day off of work (yeah, right). Ok, so that’s three lies.  According to Bell’s stats, it looks like I’m below average. I suppose for once I should be glad I’m not an over-achiever.

Bell, an anthropologist at Intel, conducted research to explore the role that lies and secrets play in our digital lives.   She starts her talk by admitting that she lied to Yahoo about her birthday.  Not a cardinal sin of course, but it did have consequences: she had forgotten her Flickr login and since she couldn’t remember her fictitious birthday, she was unable to retrieve her password and was locked out of Yahoo and other online accounts.

It turns out lying is more common than we think.  Bell says a UK survey revealed that 45% of mobile phone owners admitted to having lied about their whereabouts via text messages.  Cornell research showed that 100% of online daters have lied (usually about height or weight).  The rest of us lie for a variety of reasons: 40% to conceal misbehavior, 14% to keep our own social world ticking over; 9% to increase popularity.

The point is that lies - and its cousin, secrets - are a natural and integral part of life, and that we have constructed various social and cultural responses to them.  Lying on the witness stand is perjury, but telling a secret to one’s lawyer is perfectly legal, and in fact protected.  While most religions proscribe that lying is bad, secrets are a different story.  Secrets, Bell assets, cement relationships; paradoxically, they create trust: forms of “secret” or sacred knowledge are deeply rooted in our cultural, religious and political systems.

So what does this have to do with our digital lives?  If lies and secrets abound in the “real” world, online they positively flourish. Bells says lies about location, context, intent and identity (physical appearance, aspirations, demography, status and standing) are all possible, sometimes even required, in the context of our digital lives.  For instance, MySpace restricts access to those 14 years old and up; there are a surprising percentage of MySpace users who claim to be over 100. The question is: are information/communication technologies (and related applications and services) succeeding in part because they facilitate our lying ways?  Or are our lies and secrets are necessary to keep us ‘safe’?

Lies and secrets online are not only commonplace, they’re sometimes celebrated: the website PostSecret is a gallery of “secrets” that people have sent in via postcard, letter, etc.  (side note: PS is one of the most addictively voyeuristic sites online; it’s the 14^th most popular website and has spawned a book and community meetups).

Bell quotes James Katz, saying we’re “entering an arms race of digital deception” - that for every device that provides “truth”, another channel or device emerges that facilitates deception: cell phone tracking technology can reveal your whereabouts, but services like MobileAlibi can create a fictitious back story about why you were there (and who you were with). A newer generation of technologies have even greater potential to tell the “truth” unbidden: lie-detection algorithms on text messages and emails, GPS trackers and more.  Bell’s talk is fascinating; like most provocative speakers she raises more questions than answers, but they’re intriguing ones: is technology creating or mitigating truthiness? How are our cultural ideals and practices - something as basic and “moral” as truth telling - changing as we interact with technology?

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