A virtual death

I found Shroom_4000’s analysis of John Jordan’s 2005 paper ‘A Virtual Death and a Real Dilemma’ (http://shroom4000.blogspot.com/) to be an interesting follow up to the paper I analysed (Caspi and Gorsky, 2006). Both focussed on online deception but from different sides of the same coin. I found Shroom_4000’s dismissal of Jordan’s paper as a “referenced rant” unnecessary and untrue however their analysis suggested some interesting points.

I feel that Jordan’s paper really highlights the creation of the divide between the incidence of online deception and perception of it. The story of the Kaycee hoax illustrates the point at which individuals online form the false (as we saw in Caspi and Gorsky, 2006) belief that people online deceive at a much higher rate than they in fact do. Sure, as Shroom_4000 points out, this is not the first hoax online, nor will it be the last; but as Jordan points out the internet is certainly not the first medium used to deceive people.

I found the most interesting point of Jordan’s paper (2005) to be the use, and subsequent denial, of the dialogic nature of identity by the community members. That is, the sudden switch between a community that acknowledges – in some form – the two-way conception of identity between the context (in this case the community itself) and the individual to the sudden denial that Debbie Swenson could be a creation of the community. I feel that this switch was brushed over by Shroom_4000’s analysis but not to the detriment of the examination.


Caspi, A. and P. Gorsky (2006) 'Online Deception: Prevalence, Motivation, and Emotion' in CyberPsychology & Behaviour 9(1)

Jordan, J.W. (2005) ‘A Virtual Death and a Real Dilemma: Identity, Trust and Community in Cyberspace’,
Southern Communication Journal 70(3)