I recently read a Facebook posting about the loss of a friend that was so powerfully written that I checked it with two free online plagiarism-checkers to determine its origin.
I was vaguely embarrassed to do that, but I hoped to find that this fine piece of writing was truly original - an honestly conceived series of thoughts beautifully and refreshingly expressing a meaningful point of view about a significant experience.
In fact, that is exactly what I found the piece to be: unusually truthful in every sense of the word.
Commonly used by universities and publishers, plagiarism-checkers have even led to a newer deceptive practice known as "rogeting" - the practice of plagiarizing by using word substitutions to elude plagiarism-detection software. The term is a reference to Roget's Thesaurus, which provides synonyms for most words in the English language.
Perhaps plagiarism, while intellectually offensive, is still regarded as a relatively harmless form of deception, but in an increasingly technological age, other forms of deception take on a darker hue.
In an interesting piece of 21st-century research out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD researcher Soroush Vosoughi wrote that: "I realized that... a good chunk of what I was reading on social media was rumours."
To separate truth from rumour, propaganda, exaggeration, falsehoods, misinformation, fake news and just plain cold-blooded sociopathic lying in your face, Vosoughi and his colleagues used sites devoted to fact-checking, such as factcheck.org, hoax-slayer.com, politifact.com, snopes.org, truthorfiction.com and urbanlegends.about.com.
They found that a disturbing number of public claims and statements from a variety of sources do not stand up to scrutiny.
But the knowledge that those fact-checking and anti-plagiarism options exist and are easily available does not seem to make any difference to those who openly and happily attempt to deceive the rest of us for personal profit or advantage.
That could be because, as Sinan Aral, also of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in the journal Science, "We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information."
We've heard many times, especially in political speeches: "Everyone says" or "everyone thinks."
According to the New York Times, this has made it hard to tell the difference between "honest recommendation," "popular sentiment" and "manufactured public opinion."
In fact, data-mining expert Bing Liu, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, estimates one-third of consumer reviews on the internet are fake.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's 2009 book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies focuses on the damage done to language by politically-affiliated media folks, cynical advertisers, retailers, entertainers and politicians who inundate us with cheap slogans and sound bites, grammatical confusion, ungrounded abstractions, overstatement and blather designed not to tell the truth but to manipulate, evade, or sell a product or point of view.
Incrementally, we become numb to this increasingly deceptive world of "alternative facts" where "truth is not always the truth," and where "what he/she said is not what he/she meant."
Inevitably, a constant barrage of deception will blunt our and the next generation's resistance to habitual lying by all sorts of people about all manner of things.
"That's just the way it is," we say, "That's just how he/she/they talk."
So here's the question for educators, communicators, journalists and even parents: how will this next generation of kids begin to find a pathway for themselves through this maze of distortion and ethical pitfalls devised by the generation behind them?
Maybe, by default, that has become the biggest challenge for us, the generation that is allowing itself to be pushed, inch by relentless inch, to the edge of distrust and disbelief about everything we once thought we could rely upon.
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools living in Victoria.
