This slightly crazy, completely brilliant girl faked an entire five week holiday to South East Asian by posting photoshopped images on her social networking profiles. Read the full story here.

In a nutshell, Van Den Born, a graphic designer from Amsterdam, used her photoshop skills to lie to her online community about being overseas. She got dropped at the airport by her family, waved them off and then caught the bus home.

Genius!

And no, she didn’t just do it to be a lying, attention seeking holiday faker, she did it for a university assignment.

“I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media, and that we create an online world which reality can no longer meet

My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality. Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.”

I find this article very interesting in relation to the concept of our online self. We can all admit that we embellish our online lives on a daily basis. After travelling through North America for a year I will openly admit that while my trip had many ups and downs including losing my luggage, being robbed, having multiple bouts of food poisoning (and perhaps alcohol poisoning), my online portrayal of my trip was all rainbows and sunshine.

This crafty experiment has once again proven that the Internet is a lying bastard, and more importantly that us, the common Internet user, is reeled in every time. Hook, line and sinker!