Love at first tweet

After swallowing the humiliation from the BCS championship match-up, the football program of my Ph.D. alma mater, Notre Dame, and its biggest star, Manti Te’o, are again in the eye of a media/social-media-spun turbulence they would rather have avoided. It turns out the story Te’o was telling of a girlfriend who survived a car crash and then died of leukemia – asking him to keep on playing for her – was all a tasteless hoax. The young woman was an avatar, reducible to a Twitter account and a stolen photo pasted there. How did this happen?

Te’o and the Notre Dame crisis management team claimed he himself was the victim of a hoax. Still, some have accused the star player of inventing the tearful story to promote his career (or perhaps his celebrity status – as if the two could be easily separated). This is unlikely, so Te’o probably came to believe he had really met the love of his life – all online (he also mentioned some phone calls in the past, but those may have been a convincing figment of his imagination). This leads Timothy Egan to pronounce Te’o on the NYT web site a victim of the digital age and the culture of online dating. Egan says “at the very least, you have to make eye contact” if you want to avoid the problems Te’o encountered. I am not so sure this would have helped. I still recall an essay from the “Modern Love” series in the NYT where a young woman described how she maintained a long-lasting long-distance relationship through Skype. She said she had felt all the time as if her sweetheart – as he was staring at her from the screen – was sitting a yard away from her. If you have difficulty sensing this difference between digitized and live interaction, then the real thing may not be all that different from its simulation.

Te’o was probably delusional. Not necessarily in the clinical sense, but there is research corroborating the neurological continuity between clinical and subclinical delusional states. Why was he so out of whack? One possible answer is that he suffered one too many concussions in the line of skirmish. Another is that he is a canary in the digital pit, and his delusion was not much more extreme than other, less controversial but perhaps not much less fanciful beliefs. I am thinking, for example, of the belief that economic “value” is created by financial wizardry and by ephemeral human preferences (and, by extension, by the manipulation of these preferences). Come to think of it, is a fancy "derivative" more "real" than an avatar sweetheart?  Or is a Louis Vuitton bag or a $1,000 fancy dinner much more substantive?  To say nothing of the whole Tea Party lore (the US government has been infiltrated by Muslims, etc.), or  the arguments - and on-screen posturing - of gun lovers. Or similar conspiratorial thinking with a different ideological tinge. 

Someone could say, it’s one unadulterated “matrix” out there. And this could be the reason the movie struck such a nerve when it first came out. But we might never know the "truth" - since there is no way we can get out of our mental matrix. As Morpheus said, the brain doesn't know the difference...