On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
   - Peter Steiner, Cartoonist

Back in 1993, Peter Steiner created a cartoon for New Yorker that became an Internet meme. Two dogs, one sitting on a chair in front of a computer monitor, tells his companion on the floor, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The reason it's a meme is because everybody recognizes the quote as a truism of the essential cloaking of identity that is possible when communicating digitally. Everybody, that is, except Notre Dame linebacker, Manti T'eo, who apparently also believes in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

You can read all the sad, dimwitted, sentimental details of T'eo's heroic support and selfless love for his actually non-existent girlfriend, Lennay Kekua at The Telegraph, which provides a fairly comprehensive accounting of the saga.

Before you go all righteous rage on me about how poor young T'eo was an unwitting victim in this story, let me remind you that just because we now have digital devices everywhere we turn, and we are under a constant barrage of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pinterest, Google+, DeviantArt, CafeMom, Tagged, LiveJournal, and Orkut (to name just a few) posts, comments, tweets, pins, and clusters, it does not necessarily follow that everything coming through the wires at us is strictly true, and that we should simply trust everything we read or hear. We don't have to be rocket scientists to know that we must do some checking before we agree to "real life" meetings with strangers.

Yet often, we choose to ignore common sense and self-preservation, and jump straight ahead into