Fakebooking

[YankeeFan]

**** is going to love this one...

If you’ve ever spent a rainy evening thumbing through your Facebook newsfeed glaring with scarcely controllable envy at the seemingly endless torrent of pictures posted by unbearably smug friends who are backpacking through some country with scenes so vibrant you wonder if the saturation setting on your screen is faulty, relax.

It could all be a backpack of lies.

For five weeks Dutch student Zilla van den Born subjected her Facebook friends to the above, claiming to be travelling around South East Asia, when in reality she had never left her home city of Amsterdam. She went to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate the illusion, which was fed to her friends and family alike. The only person who knew the truth was her boyfriend.

http://bit.ly/1rU4mDF

She says she did it to make a point:

Speaking to media in her home country, she said: “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media, and that we create an online world which reality can no longer meet.

“My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality. Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.”

 

[da man]

What is reality really?

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

She had no friends or family members or coworkers or classmates in the real world who knew where she was? It's one thing to dupe a bunch of online acquaintances. Try it in real life like that Rockefeller dude or the kid we talked about here a couple years ago who faked his way onto a HS basketball team.

 

[Buck]

The point she is trying to make is both facile and obvious at the same time. Neat trick.

News flash: Lying predates social media and the internet.