Nothing but Net

A treatise on lyin' online

THE WIFE AND I are driving to a sporting goods store. The tension in the car is palpable.

"I had three pieces of toast for breakfast," she says. "I'm going to fail."

"No, you won't," I say, encouragingly.

"And five strips of bacon," she says, miserably.

"Everything will be fine," I say, unconvincingly.

For you to understand what is going on, I need to take you to the original beginning of this column, before I realized, on deadline, that we needed this emergency visit to Sports Authority.

. . .

Have you seen that amazing YouTube video clip from a minor league baseball game? The batter lines a 3-1 pitch into the left field corner. The outfielder gives up on it because it is sailing high into foul territory, but the ball girl climbs the outfield wall like a spider monkey, launches herself two more feet, twists 180 degrees in midair and spears the ball. Then she looks at the left fielder and nonchalantly flips it to him (the ball) with a mischievous smile.

This video quickly went viral as a celebration of the indomitability of womanhood. I received it under the subject line "Hooray for girls!" And it impressed me enormously until I discovered elsewhere that it was as spurious as a spitter. The footage was real until the ball left the bat. The rest was a rehearsed stunt amply assisted by computer graphics, part of what would become an ad campaign for Gatorade.

Technology has brought us here: Because everything you see is suspect, nothing you see is thrilling anymore. If tomorrow someone forwarded you a video of a naked man bowling a perfect 300 game with a cantaloupe, you would dismiss it as a fake, even if it was real.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the movies, where anything-is-possible computer imagery has succeeded in making every special effect, however spectacular, ho-hum. The expectation of unreality is so great that you get about as excited and emotionally involved in these scenes as you would if they were cartoons. No one, to my knowledge, watched the Road Runner cartoons and thrilled to the death-defying work of that stunt-double coyote.

Image manipulation is nothing new, of course. But at least it used to serve an informational purpose. For example, when politicians in disfavor began disappearing from the background of old Soviet photos of Stalin, we didn't get upset. We were kind of grateful for the obituaries. Besides, some of those photos appeared to have been altered via thumb and shoe polish. There was a certain entertainment factor.