Make or Break Issues in IT Management: A Guide to 21st Century Effectiveness
Covers all aspects of IT project management such as the way to achieve maximum benefits from the investment.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Make or Break Issues in IT Management: A Guide to 21st Century Effectiveness
Chapter 15: Manipulating Reality Deception on the Web
William Hutchinson, Edith Cowan University,
Perth, Western Australia
Matthew Warren, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia
Manipulating data for benefit has been the practice of individuals and organizations for millennia. Contemporary electronic communications media is not exempt from this practice. This chapter examines the principles of deception and some of the ways it is practised on the World Wide Web. The flexibility of digital data makes deception an easy task.
15.1 Introduction
Manipulating data to produce desired outcomes has been routinely practised since the dawn of history. Individuals and organizations choose data that suits the image they want to be portrayed; soldiers camouflage weapons to avoid detection, or disperse false information to conceal intentions. Photographic images have been faked to alter history for many years (Brugioni, 1999). However, the advent of digital data has made manipulation of images, text, sounds, and even smells much easier. Innovations in the creation of perceptual peripherals (Turk and Robinson, 2000) has made the impact of manipulated data reach a profound level. The following sections will examine the principles of deception and their use on the World Wide Web.
15.2 Principles of deception
In this chapter, deception is defined as the deliberate alteration of data or a situation's context to promote a desired outcome. Therefore, it does not include self-delusion, or a person's natural tendency to use mental models to interpret things in an individual way. The definition places emphasis on a second party being involved, where that person or organization is consciously trying to...
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