The guide to understanding how your peers and friends, bosses and family experience the Digital You, as more and more of your life is lived in the digital world.

Do you have a Digital You story to share?

A Digital You story is a story that could not have happened a few years ago. It is a story that can happen only in the digital world. It is not merely about electronic communication versus handwritten letters, or the ability to find information online instead of in a library or an encyclopedia. Certainly, the Internet makes all of these things possible in faster, more far-reaching ways than ever before. But a Digital You story also entails some element that is uniquely of the digital world.

In the story about lying about money told below, for example, there is a clearly demonstrated difference between "real world" behavior when writing a handwritten note, versus the increased degree of deception when communicating digitally by email.

If you have a Digital You story that you would like to share with us, please send it to . We'll post the best ones here.

Meanwhile, to get the ball rolling, here are a couple of examples.


In a study conducted by researchers from DePaul, Rutgers and Lehigh universities, test subjects had to contact an unknown person to split $89 with them. When the contact was by handwritten note, the test subjects lied 69 percent of the time about the total sum of money to be split. This increased to 92 percent when the communication was by email.


In a world where we are accustomed to communicating our status online, it's so easy to be "unavailable" for lunch with a tedious colleague by setting your IM status to "Away." You don't even have to duck behind your desk to avoid him.