New technology makes it so that we can communicate, collaborate, and coexist in a flat world. It takes as long to talk to someone in Dubai as it does to talk to someone in the next room. You can share work with someone in London just as well as if you’d walked down the street to their office. Interactions are simultaneously insular and far-reaching. You never have to do anything outside what you want to, but what you want to do may be in the far reaches of the world on a server in Turkmenistan.
Technology also makes it incredibly easy to save face.
It’s easy to stretch the truth about what happened to electronic things. Emails, word documents, IM thingies; all of them are little bits of electricity whizzing around the world at the speed of light. And really we don’t have any idea how they work, you know?
We know that we see words and images. You may also know that it’s all built of ones and zeros. So we type things, those things becomes ones and zeros. They zip off through the internet, which is an ephemeral web of electricity, to land in the non-physical place of your Inbox where you may open it and read words which were just typed in Mozambique one minute ago.
Therefore it is easy to say “Well, I sent it…” and let everyone commence the virtual search. Anything could have gone wrong in there, you know? A server may have gone down or you might have mistyped a letter.
Or with phones, too. Phones all have email capability but you never have any idea the coverage if you go outside the ten places you normally frequent. Often people don’t get notification of a new email, or voicemail until days later. Sometimes the little text messages get hung up somewhere.
Therefore it is easy to say “A text message came up and made my phone hung up on you!” and the other person starts to tell all of their weird tech stories.
And we believe it, don’t we? For some reason we believe that these little pieces of electricity that we don’t know the complex inner workings of could really have wandered off on their own. We really believe, for no discernible reason, that maybe those ones and zeros did cause the phone to hang up.
We believe that the ones and zeros just sprayed out across the universe and didn’t quite get snatched up by the receiving computer.
And that is why, technology is great for aiding your lies.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of homework the interwebs eat!