Tattoos and Drool

On trust and the internet

I’ve been on the internet a long time. I remember being 11 years old, before we were able to get online on my home computer, and using the Gateway at my mom’s office to go into chat rooms with a screen name like hotnsexy69 where I would lie about my age (and so would everyone else). Why? Because we could. It was easy. You could be whoever you wanted and no one on the other side of the computer screen was the wiser.

Even at that young age, I knew that things were rarely as they seemed online. Over the years as I’ve gone through different stages in my life and online, that fact has always remained. Rarely are you getting the full story, and if it seems like you are, it’s probably embellished, if even in the smallest of ways. I think it’s pretty common for a blogger to sometimes over-dramatize an event – simply because it makes for a better story. And in the end, that’s all blogs really are is a collection of stories, and no one wants to read a boring story.

Being a mom, or even just a woman on the internet seems to place you directly amidst the most volatile crossfire the web has to offer. I remember back to my Diaryland days, when wars were waged over stolen layouts and the occasional 13-year-old claiming to be pregnant with quintuplets. That was just the tip of the iceberg, as I later discovered once I got pregnant with my first child.

I’ve seen countless false claims of pregnancy, stolen photos, completely fabricated lives that everyone believes until the main character slips up and the truth comes tumbling out, whether it be by way of holes in their story that are gradually linked together or something simple like stupidly hot-linking a picture of their supposed pregnant stomach. I’ve been front and center on a popular fertility website and watched as a woman faked the death of not one, but two fictitious babies.

Other websites offer a whole different brand of crazy, where I’ve seen things like a girl posing her baby-sitting charge as her own child, going so far as to dress the child as the opposite sex and take pictures of herself “breastfeeding” said child. Or the mother who was seen by her peers as an expert on premature babies and attachment parenting until it was revealed that she had been arrested for smearing her sick daughter’s central line with feces.

Message boards are their own world of backstabbing and lies, where I’ve seen people fake their entire online existence, gang up on former friends, be vindictive to the point of cruelty, and seemingly have no grasp on who or what they are hurting.

And of course, the most recent media explosion that appears to have been all for attention, the infamous Balloon Boy debacle.

So when I got caught up this morning on the whole ordeal involving Nic at My Bottle’s Up and her account of an incident involving the TSA allegedly taking her son from her (which was later seemingly debunked by the TSA), I was, in a word, unsurprised.

I don’t know Nic any better than I know any other blogger I may happen to stumble upon on a daily basis. I’ve had her on my blogroll for a couple weeks, and still have yet to ever comment on a post of hers. So while I don’t have an emotional connection to this whole incident like many in the blogosphere, I view her blog the same way as I view those of the people I do “know” – as one big story. I don’t know who is telling the truth in her situation. I just know that lies happen on the internet, and they happen a lot.

I realize it may seem insensitive of me and maybe even unappreciative or hurtful to some for me to admit that I don’t have full trust in anything I read on any blog, even those whose authors I may have a close connection with. I don’t want to project the impression that I think everyone is lying, because I don’t. I cherish the friends I have made as a result of my blog. There’s something to be said for meeting people this way and it provides me an outlet to the outside world, and oftentimes, is the one thing that saves me from a deep pit of depression as I parent my three kids in isolation most days.

But I am cautious. I am skeptical. I share my real name and my real location because it doesn’t scare me for that information to be public. But that doesn’t mean I am blindly trusting. If someone I felt was a close friend turned out to be a complete fake, I honestly don’t know exactly how I would feel. But sadly, I don’t think it would surprise me near as much as it might have even just a year ago.

My heart goes out to those who have felt betrayed or misguided as a result of this most recent course of events. I’ve been there, way too many times. I do hope that a solid explanation comes out, if only for the sake of the closure I’m sure some need. If there’s one thing to be learned from any of the things I’ve seen in my years online, it’s that your words span miles on the internet, and the internet never forgets. Ever.

Type wisely.