Cyber Love... the dark side...

As mentioned in my recent blog Cyber Love: Pros and Cons, here's the other side of cyber love. In an objective perspective. So I'll try to coolly go over some cons. Or, as the researchers in Computer-Mediated Communication call it: deception. Nice...right?

According to the research: internet relations, just like face to face, have a probability of deception. And these deceptions happen to be similar, too. But, chats and IMs are the most common way of communicating, at least initially. Here are some of the downfalls of these methods. Notice the cool terms in bold:

Hyper personal communication. Including these strategies:

• Strategic message design: manipulating the tone and the message in the content. Such as overly romantic chats, or the opposite: simple replies that give the impression of not being interested. 
• Overly attributing negative or positive characteristics. Physical or personality traits are exaggerated or covered up.
• Strategic self-presentation which is created according to the feedback of the receiver. Apparently, this is a self fulling prophecy process where both, sender and receiver, present and form idealized expectations. Simply put: he's superman and you are willingly Lois Lane.

Impression management. (Grandma would be rolling her eyes in disbelief!) an individual controls the perception of him/her self. Could be by "misrepresenting" them self, or showing a front that is not true.

According to the studies, the reason for this is the "self concept". He/she basically wants to be accepted; to be able to develop and maintain a relationship, or simply because they want to experiment with different identities to prove their social influence. 

Here's my blunt interpretation of the politically correct terminology: 

• all those nice messages have a purpose to manipulate.
• the characteristics the person presents can be exaggerated or minimized, according to the impact they want to have on you.
• Your feedback can and will be used against you. It actually confirms if the methods are working or not, so it can be adjusted until he/she succeeds in getting you involved.
• A "misrepresentation" or "wanting to experiment with different identities" is nothing less than lying about your true self. Basically, your ideal of the other person was custom-made according to the interaction. 

For sure, it is a huge load of crap when we don't verify who we are dealing with. And, the behavior is even considered psychologically normal from the perpetrators point of view. This individual is just seeking to be accepted and thinks it's perfectly fine to lie to you. However, this is not a good start for a relationship. Even more, these "self concept" excuses are the perfect disguise for love scammers.

Who hasn't heard about the Nigerian and Romanian scams? This is the scariest reality in the cyber love world. The scams are getting very specialized, practically personalized and it is all worth the trouble for these persons. Even if they do not get money from you, they learn a lot about your personality, your image, and even the way you express yourself. This information serves as a new profile, used to scam someone else with the new identity they obtained from you. You could be  scamming someone without knowing.

So, the dark side of cyber love goes from a harmless psychological need of acceptance, to the evil purpose of drying you out of money, or stealing your persona. Be very cautious. Try to obtain third party references, use the tools available in internet to detect scams (such as image checking, and scam warnings), or better yet, request live chats right from the start. I certainly regretted overlooking these simple options.