5 | The Digital Oedipus

(Option 1) While some people have gone on “dates” with their mothers, they usually don’t extend beyond a casual family meeting for a movie or dinner. However, poor Daniel Anceneaux of Marseilles, France, in an unbelievable and rather disturbing coincidence went through half a year of online relationship with a lady whom he thought would be the girl of his dreams, but is in fact his mother.

Morality issues aside, this intriguing yet unnerving situation is an amazing example of the extent of online deception – imagine how ludicrously it would be if someone were to claim that you could not identify your mother even if you have been chatting with her for six months? Yet Daniel, known as “Prince of Pleasure” (only the French, of course) online, and his mother Nicole, or “Sweet Juliette,” conducted this affair without blatant suspicion from either side. Finally, they decided to have their first real life meeting on a beach where they realized, with great shock, of each other’s true identity. One can only imagine the traumatizing psychological effect on both when Sweet Juliette found her Prince Romeo to be quite closer and more familiar than she had expected.

The deception aspect of this relationship relied both on identity-based and message-based factors. Nicole, 52 years old in reality, presented herself as a young and attractive woman around Daniel’s age. In order to reinforce identity-based deception, she sent him a scanned photo of a younger girl from a magazine. Through their exchange, both sides used selective presentation to form an ideal image of themselves in each other’s mind. Nicole took on the disguise of a beautiful, young, and slender woman – the generally expected preferences of a man. Using a selective process to deliver cues, they managed to sustain an extended deception over the Internet. Their experience is highly supportive of the Social Distancing Theory. Nicole wished to remain as masked as possible, since she is very much straitlaced in real life, thus her online persona relied on the anonymous and distanced Internet communication to find amour. Daniel, eager to earn the love of a lady, fell for the lies and entrapped himself in a digital Oedipus complex.

Their development of a close relationship relies on at least one major component – that is, they already have had a relationship as mother and son. If we were to temporarily set aside the moral implications for a moment, we can even see why Daniel might be romantically interested in someone similar (or in this case, identical) to his mother – after all, they are more likely to have similar interests and personalities since they share much more of the same DNA than strangers and lived together in the same environment at one point. The physical attraction was affirmed when Nicole sent in a photo of another, selectively good-looking woman, and proximity was guaranteed since they both live in the same city and obviously have experienced the same surroundings. Perhaps they were surprised to find out that they both have memorable trips to the same places, and even shared some remarkably similar life stories, but given the sheer arbitrary quality of the Internet neither expected the other to be a family member. Again, the cumulative factors of kinship and environmental similarity probably led to a wide common ground as well – that is, they are likely to have shared many of the same assumptions, attitudes, and beliefs.

Very unfortunately for the two, they failed to achieve the fourth aspect of Wallace’s online relationship theory – disinhibition, until it was far too late. If either side had the courage or the sense to self-disclose more details (e.g. family circumstances, employment/marriage status, true names, etc) then the final embarrassing confrontation would have been avoided.

While Wallace’s theory fitted the situation reasonably well, McKenna’s theory does not fair so well. Identifiability, the idea that that anonymity or identifiable factors lead to more self-disclosure, is poorly supported in this case since both seemed to have lied to a significant degree even given the relatively long relationship. Removing of gating features, which claims that certain features such as physical attractiveness can lead to closer relationship, is a muddy subject since Nicole blatantly lied about her appearance. Interactional control, on the other hand, is fairly well supported as both side operated with heavy self-presentation. Connecting to similar others is on the same principle as Wallace’s common grounds and thus is supported by the case. Lastly, “getting the goods,” or obtaining information about the other person prior to meeting, was regrettably not possible (Nicole lied completely about herself) nor, I suspect, attempted.

Daniel and Nicole’s freakish circumstance serves as a nice warning to all the online daters seeking romance in a largely unregulated and unverified realm. While I do not recommend anyone in Daniel’s situation to gouge his eyes out or perform any other ridiculous self-mutilation, I hope that the digital-men would take care to verify that the digital-lady is truly whom she claims to be, and any might-be-Jocasta’s to refrain from rampant lying – in the end everyone gets hurt.

Story: http://entertainment.tv.yahoo.com/news/wwn/20051209/113414040002.html

Also reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King

Comments

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