[...] 1. I think that, if you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know that I drink a lot of diet soda. I don’t make any secret of it, or any apologies for it, or do that fake thing where I also tell you how much water I drink or how healthy I am otherwise because, well, those would be lies and I pride myself on not telling the Internet lies. [...]

I’m not quite sure what to think of Nic–some of my twitter friends [still] talk to her, so I’m guessing she’s got some good qualities. I kind of HOPE that she hallucinated it, because that would be better than lying for attention’s sake. Still disturbing, and if one is prone to hallucinations, one should not make widely published accusations!

Definitely not just the internet. Le sigh.

My sister-in-law is one of these people. She was living with us for a while, and we started getting letters addressed to her, but with a different last name than her actual one. It turned out that she had decided to take on this separate identity, there was something about her pretending to be her son, and actually had a girlfriend online… it was a mess. I still feel terrible for the person, or possibly people, that she duped with all of this.

Why would you DO that to someone? This was years ago now, but I recently found that she’s on facebook now, and she has re-created this personality, and created a facebook profile for it, and even has it on her own friend list. W H Y ? I can’t understand what you could possibly get out of playing with someone else’s emotions like that. It’s just… wrong.

I’m totally with you that it *does* matter, it really really really does. People genuinely care about what they read in blogs. (Why else would so-called “strangers” contribute tens of thousands of dollars to the March of Dimes after Maddie Spohr died? Why do people like Matt Logelin and Stephanie Nielsen find packages on their doorsteps?) And when you believe what you’re reading is real, and you invest genuine emotional energy in it, but it’s not real, that’s just….Not. Right. Even if it’s not illegal, it’s unethical. And if a blogger is outed telling one lie, it makes everything they’ve ever posted suspect. And yes, it poisons the water for everyone, making all blogs just that much less trustworthy.

I think most people think of themselves as pretty savvy virtual consumers by now. We don’t forward Snopes-y emails, we know about the Nigerian bank thing, etc etc. But people still often take blogs at face value and invest their emotional capital online pretty easily, forgetting how easily it is to fabricate just about anything when there’s no face to face interaction. (The good news is that you can’t fabricate absolutely *everything* without leaving a clue, which is why these people are almost always eventually tripped up by something — a photo, a video, an IP address.)

Anyway, would love to say more, but I’m actually a 58 year old man living in my mother’s basement, and it’s time for my tv dinner with the cats. ;-) Oh, and I promise tomorrow I’ll come back and say “Eh, I guess it’s kind of funny.”

The general public, thanks to the media, might find it hard to believe but the military is really weird about morality type stuff, even if it isn’t the enlisted person’s behavior they’re looking at. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a nice little “talking to” coming to him.

And considering the way people were going after her, comments about calling CPS, posting her address, etc. I’d be willing to bet someone at the base/post was contacted.

The rest of your argument – about “perception” is 15 different kinds of ridiculous. She “perceived” something that didn’t HAPPEN, and then not only told everyone that it did, but encouraged others to help her spread her false story.

Your MyBottlesUp/Dooce comparisons don’t even make sense.

I think Dooce stretches the truth all the time in her case many refer to it as hyperbole, but in Nic’s case she is “lying.” If you held Dooce to the same standard, she likely lies in every post.

rg