Lies, Damn Lies And Technology

Culture

from the revealing-your-true-self? dept

A few months ago we wrote about how one guy predicted that 3G mobile phones would never take off because the camera phone part would make it difficult to lie about where you were. We had no idea that most people used their mobile phones to lie about their location (or that that single factor would damn the entire product category). However, apparently the lying segment of the population is out there, and they’ve got money to spend, so solutions started cropping up, including a way to put fake image backgrounds into camera phone images to make people think you’re somewhere you’re not and (even more impressive) fake audio sounds to complete the faux imagery. There are even (apparently) bars that have fake office backdrops for camera phone enabled workers sneaking out for a drink. Douglas Rushkoff is now wondering about all this technological effort put into helping us lie better and wonders if it really shows how technology advancements make us more truthful. All these efforts show that people now need to make much more of an effort to be dishonest, which makes it even clearer (perhaps to themselves as well) how much they are lying. In fact, Rushkoff believes that such enforced honesty should be seen as an opportunity for people, rather than as a reason to avoid the technology altogether.