Human beings lie. It is almost second nature that at some point during the day we will lie. White lie or otherwise it doesn’t matter we all lie but interestingly enough when it comes to our online lives the majority of lies happen in emails.

This is the findings of a new study that was conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst title humorously enough “Liar, Liar, Hard Drive on Fire: How Media Context Affects Lying Behavior”.

The study looked at 110 same-sex pairs of college students and their conversations that were held either face-to-face, using email, or instant messaging and analyzed their interactions for inaccuracies.

What they found was  that while you could find some sort of deception across all three mediums lying was present more in instant messaging and emails; with emails coming out ahead with the number of lies told. This boiled down to the confirmation that lying was much more common, and easier, with both how far away the respondents were from each other and in the case of email the asynchronous nature of the communication.

“Ultimately, the findings show how easy it is to lie when online, and that we are more likely to be the recipient of deceptive statements in online communication than when interacting with others face-to-face,” says Feldman.

“In exploring the practical implications of this research, the results indicate that the Internet allows people to feel more free, psychologically speaking, to use deception, at least when meeting new people,” Feldman and Zimbler say. “Given the public attention to incidents of Internet predation, this research suggests that the deindividualization created by communicating from behind a computer screen may facilitate the process of portraying a disingenuous self.”

via PhysOrg

Lying online? Most of it happens in emails. is a post from: The Inquisitr

I don’t think there is a person on the net today who has been online for more that 10 or 15 years who doesn’t hold up their low number count ICQ ID as some sort of badge. While I can’t remember my ID number I do remember that it was one of the first programs I downloaded when I started using the web.

Well as being reported by Kara Swisher it seems that AOL has decided that the time has come to get rid of this once proud jewel that it paid $287 million in 1998. While ICQ may seem so old school in the day and age of social media, Twitter and Facebook it is still apparently profitable.

While ICQ may live in the shadow of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo in the States it is a different matter in Europe where it is number one in Germany, Russia and Ukraine as well as Israel and other smaller countries.

Apparently it is due to interest in ICQ by two major non-US companies that has prompted AOL to hire Morgan Stanley and Allen & Co to handle any deals regard the possible sale of the company once AOL’s spin-off from TimeWarner.

AOL to sell off ICQ is a post from: The Inquisitr