Way back in the deep dark digital past of 1995 and 1996 and long before it was trendy I participated in the then nascent human social activity of an “online relationship”. I was inspired to recall these relatively distant memories by a news link here on Instablogs claiming that “Online love is often blind and brief“. The study itself seems to be little more than a statement of the bleeding obvious: that people often misrepresent themselves when they describe themselves online to other people. This would have to be little more than a general axiom of human social reality writ small on the monitor screen. If you are really so naive to believe that people you meet online are necessarily always who they claim themselves to be, you will surely not do much better in real life. Or perhaps, to turn this sentiment on it’s head - if you are unable to discern deception in human social interaction in real life, you will unlikely be unable to discern this in cyberspace.

If you have a careful look at the criticisms people make of online romance you will find what appears to be a general bitterness and anger running through these blogs and articles, a nastiness seemingly born of just the kinds of loneliness and naivete that the critics accuse the unwitting internet romantic of possessing. The fact is - there is no 100% safe way to meet a person in a romantic manner; people misrepresent themselves every day and in many more direct and potentially dangerous ways than online deception; you are much safer sitting semi-anonymously at home communicating with people than you are sitting in a nightclub, party or coffee shop with the intention of “picking up” that dream catch. Internet romance induces people to make their assessments of others and their personal or material assets in a particular way - as delimited by the sorts of information one can glean about someone online. The fact remains - if you can not successfully maintain the intellectual stamina to be able to ascertain where there may be discontinuities or outright lies in someone’s story as they present it to you through text and images online, then you are likely to be in even more danger if you are to fall into the sphere of influence of a clever and charismatic fiend in a bar or even on a street corner.

There is in the history of computer science the concept of the Turing Test whereby a human being must determine whether the entity which is responding to their computer-facilitated questions and dialogue is a human being or a computer. If a computer manages to convince a human being of its own notional intelligence (i.e. manages to make a human believe that the machine is in fact another human person) through textual communications it is said to have passed the Turing Test. The quest for authenticity in human interrelationships with or without the technological mediation of the computer and/or the internet finds itself displaying much the same dynamic. We are ever and always seeking to determine the fidelity of the story with which we are presented by another. In the internet context this is delineated by text, image and possibly video but all in all it is much the same process of cautious appraisal and assessment that we must go through in any interpersonal communication. Perhaps people should use the internet version of interpersonal communication to hone their skills and develop strategies for discerning truth and falsehood in their daily interpersonal communications.

My own story was of many months of internet chat, of phone calls and photographs and letters and then an ill-fated and singularly romantic international journey to try and pull someone out of a bad situation they had gotten themselves into in their local (non-virtual) world. I don’t regret having chosen to throw myself into a romantic void, of taking a leap of faith in this way as that is something we all do in every single act of romance and attraction. I certainly and self-consciously accept that had I not been lonely in my own life I would never have gotten so deeply entranced by the distant promise of a virtual fidelity which never came to be. I would have done the same thing for this woman if she had lived in the next suburb or city as this is just the kind of person that I am. We live our lives in ways that define who we are to ourselves and if these self-definitions should possess moments of romantic extravagance then this is no bad thing.

Ultimately, the opening stages of any interpersonal introduction must revolve around whether or not we will take this leap of faith and trust that the other person is who we think they are - that they have passed our own Turing Test of authenticity. If you are the sort of person who falls for Nigerian money or Russian bride scams, you are probably not the sort of person who should be looking seriously at internet dating. If you can not differentiate between truth and falsehood online, you would want to be very careful indeed when attempting to negotiate relationships in corpore.