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Eric Rice recently started an interesting vid-meme over on Seesmic (video on Eric’s blog) when he pointed out that anyone could create a false character that appeared to be ‘real’, and infiltrate online networks and lives.
Nothing new here; social engineering has been done for years. But what Eric points to is that with Facebook et al anyone can now generate a new personality, head off to FB and other social sites, start sending ‘friend’ requests, and in the new digital world the chances are very good that people will ‘friend’ that person in return.
So a relationship can start to form between a ‘real’ person (your or I) and a ‘false’, made-up person (and I’m deliberately excluding ‘Amanda Chapel’ from this as ‘Amanda’ was so obviously fake).
I experienced this on Second Life when I created not only an avatar for myself ("Lee Laperriere") but also two female avatars, "Isabella Scheflo" and "Penny Cazalet". They received far more attention and ‘friend’ requests than I did. As sales people they did far better at generating customer connection than did boring ol’ male ‘Lee Laperriere’.
It’s not that hard to see why; after all, we all know that sex sells (which is why I created them in the first place).
But the implications for future online communication become apparent when you consider that in 5-7 years we will all be moving seamlessly from one 3D collaborative virtual environment to another as part of our daily web work.
Assuming that clever online bots can be built (and I’m sure that the clever folks over at MyCyberTwin are working on it), how can we be sure that the bank teller we engage in conversation with about our accounts over at ‘WestpacWorld’ will actually be real?
And if they do the job (i.e. meet our transactional requirements) will we really care?
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