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Though we now work more cooperatively, like pieces on a chessboard, the electronic communication that passes between us is a game of incomplete information, more like poker than chess. In chess, both players can see complete information about the game. In poker, you can only see the cards that are face up. But unlike poker, the goal of most of our communication is not to confuse our opponent but rather to be clear with our partner; we want, to varying degrees, to put our cards on the table. It’s the paradox of the information age: Technology connects us more than ever before but those connections are more fractured and incomplete than we are accustomed to. Missing are many of the clues we need to fully decode the intentions of others.

Another pressure of instant communication could be called the Expectation of Response Factor. In the industrial age, we wrote letters deliberately, knowing that even if we dashed off a quick note from point A it would take its own sweet postal time to arrive at point B. The recipient, in turn, could take a commensurate amount of time crafting a response. The pace of information flow allowed enough time for even time-sensitive writing to receive a modicum of consideration before being sent. Not so with the various gizmos and gadgets we now find strapped to our belts or planted on our desks. Messages appear instantly, implicitly insisting on a quick response. The Expectation of Response Factor exerts an influence on the quality of our communication, often forcing us to respond in less considered ways. In media whose nature transmits only parts of our intended symbols at best, the virtual ticking of the electronic clock cheats us of the time we need for careful or meaningful expression.

THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY

In the olden days (before about 1995), when people wanted to buy, say, a toaster, they would pick a local store known for its good selection or good pricing of small appliances and buy the one that seemed best for their needs. If they were particularly industrious, thrifty, or enamored of the process, they might call or visit two or three stores before making their purchase, dig out back issues of consumers testing magazines, or consult a catalog or two to compare price and features. As more businesses went online, people suddenly had the ability to shop not only within their local area, but almost anywhere. Large and trusted online retailers were added to the shopping mix, giving consumers a few more options if they wished to pursue them. Between June 2004 and March 2005, however, as e-commerce began exploding worldwide, people who bought online suddenly became more prone to visiting 10 or more web sites before returning to a favored location hours or days later to make a purchase.
⁶

It has been said that information is like a toddler: It goes everywhere, gets into everything, and you can’t always control it.
⁷
Someone should have told that to David Edmondson, former CEO of RadioShack. For consumers, easy access to information about vendors has become an advantage; for those like Edmondson, who had something to hide, it has meant devastation. When he joined RadioShack in 1994, Edmondson invented a couple of lines for his resume in the form of college degrees in theology and psychology from Pacific Coast Baptist College in California that he never earned. In February 2006, after just eight months at the top of his profession, he was forced to resign. Though the school had relocated to Oklahoma and renamed itself, a reporter from the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
tracked it down and uncovered the discrepancies. Edmondson’s career, built on the foundation of these lies, lay in pieces at his feet.
⁸

He’s not alone, of course. The news is full of examples of the mighty who have taken the fall. Kenneth Lonchar, former CFO and EVP of Silicon Valley software storage firm Veritas (the Latin word for
truth
), got caught in 2002 claiming a false Stanford MBA.
⁹
University of Notre Dame head football coach George O’Leary resigned when it was revealed that he had not only lied on his resume about playing football at his alma mater, but he had also falsely claimed a master’s degree.
¹⁰
Even Jeff Taylor, founder of online job-search company
Monster.com
, posted on his own web site an executive biography touting a phony Harvard MBA.
¹¹

We live in the age of transparency. In 1994, it might have been easy to get away with such shenanigans, but with the massive shift of personal records and personal profiles to databases easily accessed over the Internet, virtually everything about you can be discovered quite easily. The fact that
The New Oxford American Dictionary
lists “Google” as a verb makes this perfectly clear, as does the sample sentence it uses to illuminate its meaning: “You meet someone, swap numbers, fix a date, and then Google them through 1,346,966,000 Web pages.”
¹²
The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
recently reported a Harris Interactive poll showing that 23 percent of people routinely search the names of business associates or colleagues on the Internet before meeting them.
¹³
The
DontDateHimGirl.com
web site allows a woman to post the name and photograph of a man she says has wronged her. As the web site’s founder, Tasha C. Joseph, told the
New York Times
, “It’s like a dating credit report” for women.
¹⁴
Anyone with a video camera can share with the world your worst moments by posting them on
YouTube.com
, a revolution that within just a couple of years of its launch has had a dramatic effect on politics, entertainment, law enforcement, music, and countless people’s private lives. Political pollsters can compare your age, income, party registration, type of car you own, charities you donate to, and a glut of other readily available personal information to predict with a very high degree of accuracy how you will vote.
¹⁵

These facts exert a profound influence on business. Before transparency allowed them to peer through the tall trees, outside observers could discern the outline of a forest, but thought little about what was growing beneath. Companies, for instance, could form a joint venture to protect themselves from the ramifications of a dubious enterprise, believing that if the unit got into trouble it would not hurt the reputation of the parent company. In a transparent world, however, when your joint venture transgresses, everybody knows who owns it. In the past, training its managers in proper conduct was sufficient to protect a company’s reputation because line employees had little contact with the outside world and rarely got a company into trouble. Now, any employee can say something about a company in a chat room or in a blog and the next day it might appear on DrudgeReport or The Smoking Gun. There’s even a new word for it—whistleblogging—when employees create personal online journals to report company wrongdoing. The new transparency doesn’t allow you to hide in the dark underbrush, to have a joint venture here, or hire an agent there. Observers can easily tell the trees from the forest.

An information society also breeds a surveillance society. People are more curious and they
look
a lot more. They look because it is suddenly easy to do so; looking costs little, requires even less effort, and pays off with everything from the best prices for goods and services to revelations of the unsavory. Around the world, viewers are glued to their television sets by “reality TV,” programming that purports to give true glimpses of private lives (the United States now has a whole network dedicated to it, and the British version of
Celebrity Big Brother
touched off an international incident
¹⁶
). We’ve always been interested in what was happening next door, but now we can actually see it. It’s like examining a drop of water under a microscope. When you first place the drop on the slide, it looks clear and pristine. But the microscope’s lens reveals a hidden world. With each adjustment of the magnification you see organisms and objects that before you could only have imagined; what first appeared clear and unpolluted suddenly appears messy and complex. Microscope technology changes the way you look at water, and with your curiosity thus piqued, you can’t help but wonder what worlds might exist within other familiar objects.

People look more often because the looking is easier and there has been more to find. Imagine the gratification of Heather Landy, the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
staff writer who uncovered David Edmondson’s embellished RadioShack resume. She began her investigation “into Edmondson’s credentials after learning that the executive, who started two churches before making the transition to a full-time business career, [was] scheduled to go to court . . . to fight his third drunken-driving charge.”
¹⁷
Corporate scandals, celebrity breakups, political corruption: Each day’s news—delivered instantly via television, radio, web site, cell phone, RSS feed, and BlackBerry—exposes the transgressions of the icons of the age. Whether the media are addicted to it because they have so much bandwidth/airtime/column space to fill or we’re hooked by our newfound access, in the information age, once we’ve gotten a taste of scandal we can’t seem to get enough.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

When Paul Chung hit the send button on an e-mail message to his friends, he sent a promising career in investment banking into a tail-spin. The Carlyle Group had recently hired the 24-year-old Princeton graduate and relocated him to their Seoul, Korea office. Three days later, he used the company’s network to boast to his buddies in New York about his lavish new lifestyle. “I know I was a stud in NYC,” he wrote, “but I pretty much get about, on average, 5-8 phone numbers a night and at least 3 hot chicks that say they want to go home with me every night I go out.” Later, he bragged about using one bedroom in the apartment his employer provided as his “harem” and another for sexual activities. Astounded recipients forwarded the message to thousands of people on Wall Street, until it finally ended up in his boss’s in-box. Chung lost his job—and his reputation along with it.
¹⁸
That was in 2001. Five years later, people are still talking about it. I googled “Paul Chung Carlyle,” as his future employers and colleagues undoubtedly will, and found the story cited five times on the first page returned. It will follow him the rest of his life.

The brain forms and stores memories by building networks of neurons. Each network imprints and stores the millions of detailed impressions that make up a memory. The World Wide Web works exactly the same way. Its vast, interconnected database has a persistence of memory that will long outlive us. Even web sites that are pulled down or deleted live on forever on a site called Wayback Machine, which archives 55 billion web pages dating back to 1996.
¹⁹
The persistence of memory in electronic form makes second chances harder to come by. Before the information revolution, a quack doctor could move to another town and hang out his shingle without fear of repercussion. Now, states keep instantly accessible databases detailing every charge and investigation lodged against him. The same holds true for companies, stores, and eBay sellers. In the information age, life has no chapters or closets; you can leave nothing behind and you have nowhere to hide your skeletons. Your past is your present, and it catches up with you like a truck backing over what it left behind.

It’s not just smoking-gun e-mails like Chung’s that get people into trouble in the information age. With the democratization of information, anyone can publish whatever they think at whatever time he or she thinks it, true or false. The standard of information verification has been lowered. In the mass media age of the 1980s and 1990s, large media companies still acted as the gatekeepers and watchdogs of public information. A professional class of journalists and editors vetted most claims and accusations for veracity before broadcasting them, applying a standard of independent proof and corroboration, or they paid the price for neglecting to do so. Information technology takes this responsibility out of the hands of trained professionals and places it in the hands of anyone with a keyboard. Any disgruntled employee can strike back. A dishonorable accuser with a false accusation can gain instant currency. As was prophetically said in a time before electronic communications (attributed to Mark Twain by some), “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
²⁰
Now, it can circle the earth numerous times in the time truth takes to simply think, “shoe.” Reputations formerly carved in stone now seem easily besmirched by anyone with access to a keyboard. Accusations still uninvestigated gain as much currency as proven truth and, even if they are untrue, consume significant resources to defend against. Technology provides just about everyone the ability to quickly and cheaply compare and contrast reputations before making decisions. As reputation becomes more perishable, its value increases. As it becomes more accessible, it becomes a greater asset—and liability.