The Hoax of Digital Life

Tim Egan

Currently a regular contributor to the New York Times editorial section, Tim Egan (b. 1954) is a journalist and writer who lives in Seattle, Washington. He has written several nonfiction books about American history, including The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, published in 2006, and The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America, published in 2008.

KEY CONTEXT This article was originally published as an op-ed piece for the New York Times on January 17, 2013, in response to the growing scandal involving Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o. During the 2012 college football regular season, Notre Dame had been undefeated, in large part due to the play of linebacker Te’o, who had told reporters that he was playing inspired football to honor his grandmother and his girlfriend, both of whom, he said, had died on the same day at the beginning of the season. In January, just after Notre Dame advanced to the national championship game, reporters discovered that Te’o’s girlfriend never existed. Te’o later claimed that he was the victim of an extensive hoax with someone pretending online, on the phone, and through texts to be the girl he thought of as his girlfriend. Later that year, Te’o was drafted by the San Diego Chargers to play in the National Football League.

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Ionce tried to talk somebody out of pursuing a mail-order bride, a young Filipino who for a relatively modest fee would agree to move to Spokane, Washington, and start a new life with a complete stranger. Among the many questions raised by this half-baked plan was: How could you marry someone you had never met?

The case of Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame linebacker and finalist for college football’s highest honor, and his fake dead girlfriend takes this question to a whole new level. How can someone claim to have fallen in love with a woman he never met?

The answer, in part, is what’s wrong with love and courtship for a generation that values digital encounters over the more complicated messiness of real human interaction. As my colleague Alex Williams reported in a widely discussed piece a few days ago, screen time may be more important than face time for many 20- and 30-somethings. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret,” said Shani Silver, 30, in the story.

Technology, with its promise of both faux-intimacy and a protective sense of removal, does not alone explain the bizarre and still unfolding story of Te’o, who claimed that the love of his life died of leukemia last September after also suffering from a serious car crash. A Stanford student, this love — Lennay Kekua — had urged Te’o to play for her, no matter what happened.

5 Before the fraud was revealed, Te’o recalled to the Chicago Tribune one of the final conversations he had with the made-up girlfriend: “She said, ‘Babe, if anything happens to me, promise that you’ll stay over there, that you’ll play and that you’ll honor me through the way you play.’” All she wanted were white roses, which he sent to her.

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If Notre Dame wasn’t the land of leprechauns, Win-One-for-the-Gipper mythology, Rudy and Touchdown Jesus, I might be more inclined to believe Te’o. This particular college football fairy tale, then and now, smells like one of the serial lies of Lance Armstrong.

But let’s take the nation’s most storied Catholic university at its word. And, as explained by Notre Dame officials on Wednesday night, after they’d hired a private investigative firm to sort out the details, the story is a compelling parable of digital dating culture.

At the center of this episode is the astonishing assertion by the Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick that Te’o never actually met his phantom lover. Never. No face time. The entire relationship was electronic. And yet she was likely to become his wife, according to Te’o’s father.

“The issue of who it is, who plays the role, what’s real and what’s not here is a more complex question than I can get into here,” said Swarbrick, at the press conference on Wednesday. Actually, it’s not that complicated. The woman either existed, and then died, or didn’t exist, and therefore couldn’t have died at such a young and tender age. Her passing gave a sports-soaked nation reason to feel sympathy for a Fighting Irish hulk who also happens to be a devout Mormon. His biography, we’re told, is real.

10 The digital girlfriend, Te’o said in an interview last October, two months before he found out the fraud, “was the most beautiful girl I ever met. Not because of her physical beauty, but the beauty of her character and who she is.”

Her character. Remember, she’s an avatar, at best. Again, let’s assume this august institution of higher learning and moral discipline, and all its representatives, are now telling the truth. Then let’s look at this person with the extraordinary character, the woman Te’o fell for. There was a picture, from their online encounters, of a lovely woman, a Stanford student, supposedly. There was a voice, from telephone conversations, of someone as well. And that someone finally called him up in early December and said the whole thing was a hoax perpetuated by an acquaintance in California, according to Deadspin, which broke the story.

“The pain was real,” said Swarbrick. “The grief was real. The affection was real. That’s the nature of this sad, cruel game.”

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No, that’s the nature of people who develop relationships through a screen. The Internet is the cause of much of today’s commitment-free, surface-only living; it’s also the explanation for why someone could tumble head-over-heels for a pixelated cipher.¹ Online dating was only the start of what led us down this road.

To fall in love requires a bit of unpredictable human interaction. You have to laugh with a person, test their limits, go back and forth, touch them, reveal something true about yourself. You have to show some vulnerability, some give and take. At the very least, you have to make eye contact. It’s easier to substitute texting, tweeting or Facebook posting for these basic rituals of love and friendship because the digital route offers protection. How can you get dumped when you were never really involved?

15 “If anything good comes from this,” said Te’o in a written statement, “I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage people online than I was.”

Te’o called himself a victim of an elaborate hoax. If he’s telling the truth, he’s right in one sense, but wrong in his conclusion. He’s a victim of his age, people who are more willing to embrace fake life through a screen than the real world beyond their smartphone.