An examination
of the social and psychological implications of the Manti Te’o scandal
BY
ADAM PARKER
The questions are multiplying.
When the website Deadspin
revealed this week that star Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o had
been carrying on a virtual relationship with a nonexistent girlfriend, who he
claimed died of cancer at the same time he lost his grandmother, the Internet
lit up with speculative postings, office conversations turned to the topic and
the news media has gone into overdrive.
Te’o has claimed he was “the victim of
what was apparently someone’s sick joke and constant lies,” duped into starting
and sustaining a relationship with someone called Lennay Kekua. Others have
suggested the story was made up to garner sympathy and enhance his standing in
the eyes of fans and the NFL, which is set to draft him.
And in what way did our media-saturated
culture assist in perpetuating the lie? Is social media a dangerous house of
mirrors that distorts truth and deceives its gullible occupants, or is it a
tool the deceitful can use to advance their stories and agendas?
“In retrospect, I obviously should have
been much more cautious,” Te’o said in a
statement released Thursday. If anything good comes of this, I hope
it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online
than I was.”
Victim or liar?
Inventing a fake girlfriend (or
boyfriend or buddy or sidekick) is a relatively common occurrence, said Von
Bakanic, a sociology professor at the College of Charleston.
“I would imagine what he’s done has been
done hundreds of thousands of times, by anyone who wants to project an image of
themselves they like better than the image others might have of them,” Bakanic
said. “You can be whoever you want to be on social media.”
Technology has been harnessed for
centuries to fool people, Bakanic noted. Scams come to us in the mail, by
telephone and from door-to-door deceivers, not only across the Internet.
Lying and getting ripped off is nothing
new, then, but the way we communicate via social media platforms certainly is,
and a general lack of experience with complicated technologies can make it
difficult to stay safe or to provide young people with necessary guidance and
ground rules, she said.
“(Some of us) may not be savvy enough to
avoid being duped by others who are presenting themselves in a fictitious way,”
Bakanic said.
And when victims and perpetrators have
an audience, things can get complicated.
Media consumers love a heartwarming
story, and because electronic media tends to bombard us with information at a
quick pace, it’s common to pass it along to our friends, family and colleagues
without checking its veracity, Bakanic said.
Rumors, she said, are sometimes true and
often false. “It’s hard to separate the two.”
Fact check
But that’s exactly what professional
journalists are supposed to do, said Charles Bierbauer, dean of the College of
Mass Communications and Information Studies at the University of South
Carolina.
“I’m sure you’ve heard that old
journalism adage: ‘If your mother says you love her, check it out.’ So I
suppose this becomes, ‘If your virtual girlfriend say she loves you, make sure
she’s real.’ ”
Journalists are just as susceptible to
false information as anyone else, Bierbauer said. Members of the general public
will sometimes fall off the cliff like lemmings, but reporters have a
responsibility to verify the assertions people make.
This, in turn raises a question: Must
they verify everything?
When a journalist gets information from a primary source (as in the Te’o case),
is it ever OK to accept that information at face value?
“When you get the individual himself,
the primary source, you’re less likely to check things out, especially if it’s
run-of-the-mill stuff,” Bierbauer said. But in this case, the reporter who
wrote the original
feature story doesn’t seem to have asked some basic questions: “Is
there a back story? Who is this girl? What is she like?”
Virtual world
Jennifer Wright, a professor of
psychology at the College of Charleston with expertise in moral development,
said fibbing about relationships (and more) happens all the time.
“We’re not all that tethered to reality
anyway,” Wright said. Our brains are designed to switch between reality and
fantasy. “That’s what imagination is. The very same mechanisms in our brain
that help us track reality also help us decouple from reality.”
Now add our expectations to the mix.
“(Te’o is) part of a social structure
that has a very clear picture of the kind of person you need to be to get the
social rewards you’re looking for,” Wright said. Young football stars are
supposed to have loving and pretty girlfriends. And if they have triumphed in
the face of tragedy, all the better.
But Te’o probably doesn’t have a real
girlfriend, she said.
“Perhaps he’s hiding the fact that this
piece of his life is missing. In an increasingly robust virtual world, it
becomes easier and easier to disseminate embellishments and falsehoods that
strengthen one’s public persona, Wright said.
The sophisticated nature of the
girlfriend character and her interaction with Te’o suggests it’s unlikely he
was the “victim of a sick joke,” she said. But it’s plausible.
“Look at how much time and energy people
spend to create computer viruses,” or otherwise inflict harm on others, she
said. “Certainly it’s not beyond the ken to imagine someone wanting to dupe
him.”
Some people perceive that the success of
others can hinder their own success, and this can cause them to attempt
sabotage, Wright said. Maybe Te’o’s duper was trying to take the wind out of
his sails, to trip him up. Or maybe Te’o really was satisfied with a purely
electronic relationship, she said. It’s not that difficult to imagine.
“People hear and see what they want to
hear and see. ... It’s not so hard to create a fake narrative. Living in a
virtual world is becoming a much more common, accepted and comfortable thing.
Young kids have lives in that space that people my age don’t understand. It
exaggerates the possibility of creating fake realities. So our connection to
reality becomes that much more tenuous, because we can be whoever we want to
be. We can create an avatar.”
Repercussions?
One final question: Does the controversy
disqualify him in any way as a football player? Whether he lied or fell victim
to a hoax, Te’o remains an exceptional talent on the field. Is his gullibility,
or his deceit, reason enough to deny him what is likely to be an exciting and fruitful
career on the field?
“All he’s done is create a story,”
assuming he was not merely a victim of a hoax, Bierbauer said. Paul Ryan
falsely claimed to have run a marathon in under three hours. “He’s still a
congressman. We’re all vulnerable, we can all be gullible, we all embellish.”
The media and its consumers are
accomplices, he said.
“We like good stories. We love good bad
stories.” We love creating ideals and admiring heroes. “That gives us a little
bit of hope. We want our heroes to have all these wonderful dimensions, and
nobody can live up to all of that. I think we’ve had hero worship for a long
time, haven’t we? And it’s been difficult on the heroes. After all, we’re all
just people.”
Follow Adam Parker at www.facebook.com/aparkerwriter.