The Cyber Effect

by Mary Aiken

  Another reason: The very qualities that make a narcissist undesirable in real life—selfishness, arrogance, self-centeredness, and a need to feel better than you in every way—can actually give them a leg up online. They are now more competitive in the mating selection process, because the established cyber norm is to parade your accomplishments, post pictures of your expensive car and your gorgeous house, and document every meal of your fantastic travels around the globe for all your cyber-friends to see. Most important of all: posting lots and lots and lots of pictures of yourself looking good.

  Narcissists need admiration, flattery, and loads of attention. They need an audience. This is why cyberspace is made for them. Their highest highs can come from making people fall in love with them. The problem is, given the way they ooze confidence and cybercharm, it may be harder to spot them—and know to stay away. To help you out, here’s a mini-inventory of questions to ask yourself:

  • Do they always look amazing in their photos?

  • Are they in almost all of their photos?

  • Are they in the center of their group photos?

  • Do they post or change their profile photo constantly?

  • When they post an update, is it always about themselves?

  Cyber-Infidelity

  Having an adulterous affair used to require fluke, luck, and a lot of hiding in shadows. People had to hope for chance meetings or fabricate work conferences and weekend retreats to cover their tracks—then check into strange hotels under false names, pay cash, and sneak out before sunlight. Not everyone is cut out for such subterfuge.

  But for individuals who struggle to stay in a monogamous relationship, technology has made the temptation much, much greater. You can reach out from the comfort of your own home—and flirt on a bad hair day and in your bathrobe. In an hour, you can create a new profile on a site, create a new email address and a pseudonym, and have a date in front of your webcam. Nobody will know but you—and your cyber-fling.

  There has been a societal change in cyber-dating for those who are married who desire a discreet affair on the side. There are now a growing number of these sites and apps in operation—homepages with FAQs such as Why have an extramarital affair? that are answered with seductive rationales. The normally unspoken rules of an affair are often part of the “terms and conditions” that must be agreed to before becoming a member of the site. Discussed so blandly, and practically, it is another way of normalizing or justifying behavior that is considered by most people to be unethical and deceptive.

  (On a side note, it’s worth knowing that you aren’t the only one who never reads these terms-and-conditions agreements carefully. An experiment was done in a London café with a free Wi-Fi hotspot in 2014. Six users clicked the box to accept the terms and conditions even though, by doing so, they were agreeing to “assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity.” Needless to say, the term was not enforced.)

  For some, having a cyber-affair is a way to practice and “pretend” infidelity. You may have fantasies about straying from your marriage, but by keeping it online, you can feel safely distanced from the actual behavior and deception. Hey, it wasn’t me at all! The online self is compartmentalized, a type of dissociative anonymity. It’s a convenient way to stay guilt-free.

  It is well known in military psychology that killing from a distance is considered easier than killing at close range. This explains why it is easier for most people to push a button that sends a droid or smart bomb that is targeted to hit people far away than to face another individual and witness the effects of your aggression. The greater the distance you are from the people you are harming, the easier it is on your conscience.

  That’s why I suspect that, in cyber-affairs, the perceived distance between the lovers helps them to depersonalize and not consider the people they are hurting.

  When cyber-infidelity ceases to be enough—and there is an escalation effect involved in infidelity, like all deceits (the slippery slope)—you can move it into real life without missing a beat. Now with apps like Hinge, Lavalife, Grindr, meet2cheat, Affairs Club, and Ashley Madison, which were all designed specifically for casual hookups and affairs, you can easily syndicate online to find cohorts to be unfaithful with. But cyber-cheating doesn’t come without risk. The hacking of Ashley Madison in 2015 was disastrous for its 30 million adulterers, but at the same time, it provided a treasure trove of incredible data for researchers. Annalee Newitz of Gizmodo reported a massive gender divide when it comes to extramarital affairs, pointing out that while 20 million men had checked messages on the site, only 1,492 women had. Ashley Madison has since denied these figures, arguing that many more women used its site. In an interesting cyber twist, it appears that extensive use of female chatbots may have confounded interpretation of the data.

  Geographically and culturally, there are other interesting data for analysis. “Italian users were most likely to be looking for a short term relationship,” according to Wired magazine, “while German and Austrian users preferred a long term arrangement. Chinese users most frequently opted to keep things online, expressing a preference for a ‘cyber-affair,’ something of no interest to Japanese and South Korean users.”

  Untold numbers of divorces and breakups resulted from the hack, but there were much larger consequences. Given the release of private information into the public domain, thousands of individuals will now be blackmailed, and two people have already committed suicide. And there were eight thousand Ashley Madison users in the country of Pakistan, where adultery is illegal. People who signed up must have recognized that there is always risk associated with adultery, but something seduced them into participating anyway. Perceived anonymity is a powerful cyber effect. And risk, as we know, cyber-migrates from online to real life. Unfortunately in Pakistan, that could mean users will be migrating to jail. As one meme suggests, Ashley Madison should change its motto from “Life is short. Have an affair” to “Life is short. Hire an attorney.”

  Sex can be like a drug. So can romance. Technology has re-created the same conditions—availability and constant temptation—that plague (or delight) movie stars, rock singers, and professional athletes, who may try to be monogamous and faithful but aren’t superhuman after all. For an individual who struggles with impulsivity or compulsive behavior, the promise of these easy-affair apps can create serious problems.

  As early as 2009, The Guardian newspaper reported that a Facebook affair or cyber-infidelity was the listed cause for a growing number of divorces in family law practices in the U.K. Several stories hit the media that year—a woman who discovered that her husband was having virtual sex with another man, a woman who discovered her husband was having a Facebook affair, and a British couple who were divorcing after the husband was found cheating on his wife with a character on Second Life.

  The ethics of cyber-infidelity is a burgeoning area of the law, which is evolving differently, country by country. In the U.K. and Canada, sexting, lurid Facebook posts, and other manifestations of infidelity do not qualify as “adultery” per se—because sexual intercourse has not taken place in the real world—although these may serve as a reason to end a marriage. In the United States, excessive time spent online, whether it’s for cyber romance or gaming, has been used in court to show a history of poor parenting and has impacted the amount of child custody granted.

  You can’t call it adultery, but that doesn’t mean that cyber-infidelity isn’t a serious breach of trust. These indiscretions have consequences that are very real. People who have wandered away from a committed relationship and family life in order to seek love online or even just virtual sex can leave their partners and families feeling abandoned and victimized. A special issue of The Journal of Treatment and Prevention discussed the emotional outcomes of virtual distractions and disloyalties in a compelling article called “Is It Really Cheating?” which convinced me of the resulting trauma of this sort of betrayal.

  Since real-world emotions play out
online, where there’s cyber-infidelity, there’s also jealousy—and “self-help” websites informing spouses of how to look for telltale signs of a partner cheating online. Multiple studies have shown that social-network activity does trigger and amplify jealousy among users, which brings me to a quick murder story. It has to do with the uncontrollable cyber-jealousy of Giuseppe Castro, a man in Italy who decapitated his wife when he suspected she was having an online affair.

  “She was always chatting with other men,” he told police. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  Virtual Girlfriends

  LovePlus and its sequels are Japanese video games that offer avatar love for a handheld Nintendo DS or for Apple’s iOS. These games are marketed as “dating simulators” that help individuals learn to be in a relationship, and possibly even learn to love. Since its launch in 2010, LovePlus has attracted hundreds of thousands of players worldwide, from middle-school-age boys and girls to adults who prefer the company of one of the three sweet unreal girls offered by the game—Rinko, Manaka, or Nene—rather than deal with the headaches of being with an actual human being.

  Rinko, Manaka, and Nene are adorable and devoted. And their personalities can be adjusted in settings. Best of all, unlike the cyber-melodrama Her, they are programmed never to dump you. It’s just not in their code.

  Players have declared that their love for these virtual girlfriends feels real—and is consoling, supportive, and nurturing. We know from studies that people can form real and authentic emotional attachments to virtual characters. An avatar will always reflect an aspect of its creator and could be, in some ways, more revealing than a self-consciously manufactured and curated self-portrait.

  Some have used the video game as a refuge when going through a bad breakup. “I would say that a relationship with a LovePlus character is a real relationship,” said anthropologist Patrick Galbraith, who specializes in Japanese popular culture. “People are really intimately involved.”

  But can we really call it love when there’s nothing to lose? Would anybody ever write a song to Rinko, Manaka, or Nene? If human beings become used to unconditional machine love, what does it mean for their emotional resilience after a real breakup?

  Let’s take this a step further. If human beings begin to prefer demure and devoted Japanese anime characters over real women, what does this mean for the future of the human race? As Norman Holland writes, this parallels the sci-fi story The Stepford Wives, a male fantasy about women who are completely satisfying because they are docile and have no real needs of their own because they are machines.

  In order for our species to survive and thrive, people need to mate with other people, not just fantasize about Rinko, Manaka, and Nene. In Japan, this concern is no longer mere speculation. A government survey released recently estimated that nearly 40 percent of Japanese men and women in their twenties and thirties are single, not actively in a relationship, and not really interested in finding a romantic partner either. Relationships were frequently described as “bothersome.”

  Another survey found that one in four unmarried Japanese men in their thirties were virgins. The number of virginal single women in their thirties was only slightly less. At the time, Shingo Sakatsume, who works as a “sex helper” and counsels middle-aged virgins, observed, “In Japanese society, we have so much entertainment beyond love and sex. We have animation, celebrities, comics, game, and sports….Why do you need to choose love or sex over the other fun things that don’t have the potential for pain and suffering? The illusion of a perfect relationship, combined with the Japanese fear of failure, has created a serious social problem.”

  By 2060, if current trends continue, Japan’s population will have shrunk by more than 30 percent.

  Cyber-Celibacy

  Don’t assume the explosion in virgins is restricted to Japan. There are a number of factors online—invincibility for starters—that could create a heightened fear of failure in the real world and a wish to avoid pain by restricting human contact to virtual relationships. And the less practice the population gets with face-to-face interactions, presumably the worse they will become at them—only amplifying their vulnerability. Cultural considerations aside, what is happening in Japan could come to pass everywhere.

  Intimacy comes with a risk and can be difficult for some. For those who have had painful experiences in early relationships, or difficulty during a developmental stage, it can feel too dangerous, too risky. In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle provides some insight as to the appeal of tech and its ability to arrest or mitigate fears of intimacy. “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.”

  I wonder, though, if technology itself could be keeping us from learning how to be intimate—and feel comfortable in a close, caring, face-to-face relationship. Some surveys suggest that face-to-face encounters between individuals—romantic or otherwise—are steadily on the decline. And there is evidence that dating apps and sexting, as well as other virtual encounters, actually may have a negative effect on people’s sex lives—and, importantly, what we traditionally call human intimacy. Dr. Craig Malkin, clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School, makes a case that technology itself can make us afraid of intimacy:

  Strangely enough, our brains don’t seem to care if the thrill comes from great sex, drugs, or an epic win in World of Warcraft; they all cause massive amounts of dopamine, a feel-good neurotransmitter, to start spilling into our brain’s reward center. And being something of a neurological prime mover, dopamine tends to keep us chasing after the same thrill again and again, regardless of the consequences. So while gaming or pornography can’t ever cure our loneliness, over time they do become an incredibly addictive salve—and that makes it easier and easier to turn away from people and back to cyberspace.

  The end result is that much as people in pain sometimes drown their sorrows in alcohol, the cybercelibate abuse technology, relying on it to provide relief, relaxation, self-soothing, excitement, and even connection (albeit limited) that they could be getting from live people….

  And that’s why cybercelibacy is a problem for all of us. We’re all a little anxious about intimacy, aren’t we? Some researchers have even suggested that technological isolation is at least one contributing factor to the decline in marriage and committed long-term relationships.

  In other words, despite everything I said in chapter 1, and all the evidence that we might be in the midst of a sexual revolution, the current era of the easy hookup appears to have created more intimacy online, and perhaps even more sexual activity, but less actual contact sex. As Turkle puts it, more people are “alone, together.” In an age of technology, this is the new definition of sexual intimacy.

  The Uncanny Valley

  Romantic love has never been easy. I guess you can’t blame people for hunting down some simpler solutions, or for technology to keep designing them. The search for something that approximates real romantic love and companionship (but without the problems of dealing with actual people) leads technologists and the industry to create artificial-intelligence solutions—robots programmed for all kinds of purposes, to provide anything from comfort to therapy.

  The field of cyber-love and robotics is growing, and the sexbot industry is now attracting big money, tech innovations, and high-level artistry—to make the bots as real as real can be. In fact, they are so real that one Japanese manufacturer of the humanoid robot, a cute puppy-eyed social companion called Pepper, had to take the unusual step of creating an urgent “term of condition” for users: “The policy owner must not perform any sexual act or other indecent behavior” on the machine, which is designed to live with humans. One dissatisfied owner, after an alcohol-fueled rage, was arrested after assaulting Pepper.

  As for love and companionship—a real relationship—someday, just like in the movies, there may be avatars and bots that mimic humanness so well that re
al human beings fall head over heels in love with them. For now, though, there’s a well-known tech-design problem getting in the way. In the film industry, this was first discovered and documented in 1988, when Pixar screened a computer-animated short film called Tin Toy and learned that the test audiences hated the sight of a realistic human baby who terrorized the toys. The reaction was so strong that Pixar decided that, going forward, it would create animations that weren’t too closely human in appearance. Why would an animation that is “too close” to human repel audiences?

  “We still don’t understand why it occurs or whether you can get used to it, and people don’t necessarily agree it exists,” said Ayse Saygin, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, to Scientific American. “This is one of those cases where we’re at the very beginning of understanding it.”

  Some argue that a perfect replica might be acceptable, but an approximation is just too creepy. “Pixar took a lesson from Tin Toy,” said Thalia Wheatley, a psychologist at Dartmouth College. “We have to nail the human form or not even go there.”

  Filmmaking, especially animation, relies increasingly on the technology of computer-generated imagery, or CGI, which is capable of producing a close facsimile of a human being. But those avatars in the film Avatar were blue for a reason—and audiences found them beguilingly beautiful. And audiences and reviewers reacted negatively to the train conductor and other characters in the animated film The Polar Express. (Was that Tom Hanks or not?) Rather than replicating humanness, these facsimiles seem to leave people feeling queasy or sick, a reaction not unlike one that some people experience when they see bad plastic surgery.