By Nick Harding
Mobile phones, BlackBerrys, emails, social networking... Never before has it been so easy to cheat on a partner. But has technology made it simply too difficult for philanderers to cover their tracks?
What could be more family-friendly than a Nintendo Wii, a games console replete with motion-sensing technology and gleaming white purity? Just look at the marketing; the families bounding around the living room, gurning with unbridled joy as they compete with each other at video tennis and baseball.
The message is clear; a Wii is the new social hub, it coaxes gloomy teenagers out of their bedrooms and weans them off Grand Theft Auto. Wii players don't buy trench coats and shoot up the local burger bar. A Wii does not warp fragile young minds. In the Wii family, if little Johnny gets tetchy he can always give Daddy a working over on electronic boxing, no harm done. Wii stands for wholesome, healthy family values. It's even got brain training and fitness applications.
So the recent stories about the man in the United States who reportedly filed for divorce, citing his Wii as a catalyst for his wife's infidelity, would have had Nintendo's marketing Svengalis frothing at the mouth.
Returning from a blood-and-guts deployment in Iraq, the unnamed soldier is said to have plugged in his console, no doubt for some light relief, and uncovered evidence that while he was fighting the insurgency, his wife had been conducting her own secret manoeuvres. You see, a Wii has a gizmo that allows a player to store his or her personal profile, called a Mii. The soldier discovered that his wife's Mii had spent long evenings virtual bowling with another Mii. When he confronted her, she admitted that the mystery Mii was actually a lover. It probably never entered her mind that the games console could be anything but inert.
However, as more and more philanderers are discovering, modern technology has an increasingly unpleasant ability to trip us up, even the whiter-than-white Wii.
In today's world, to function as an effective member of 21st-century society, we have to engage with a bewildering array of electronic gadgets, few of which we fully understand. We stomp digital footprints all over the place, and the unforeseen result of engaging in the information age is that it is becoming harder to have secrets - and, as a result, it is harder to cheat on each other.
Day-to-day actions, such as taking the bus to work and buying a magazine on the way, used to be ephemeral. But today, every journey, every communication, every penny spent, is logged and stored. As we move through life, we leave millions of specks of electronic evidence. Stored on hard drives and mainframes, this data acts like specks of DNA sprayed across the bedsheet of cyberspace. It's all there waiting to incriminate us.
In the face of our know-it-all culture, extramarital affairs do not stand a chance. They are becoming impossible to maintain. Those classic long-running infidelities of the Seventies and Eighties are dying, gradually killed off by the rise of the machines that sit quietly in the corners of our rooms, their beady LED indicators flickering malevolently, storing information about our thoughts and habits, ready to use it as a weapon against us.
As science drags us forward, it's a safe prediction that within the next decade, traditional affairs - the ones with longevity, the ones that take planning, scheming and logistics - will have vanished altogether.
The evidence is already mounting. The number of divorces where adultery is cited as the reason for the marriage break-up is dropping. From 2005 to 2006, the number of divorces granted in the UK fell by 4,5 percent to 148 141, from 155 052, the second consecutive drop and the lowest number since 1977. Last year, just 29 percent of divorces happened as a consequence of an affair, down three percent on the previous year.
Affairs are getting shorter, too. Currently, the most common duration of an affair is less than six months (68 percent of them). Twenty years ago, it was three years.
Affairs are fizzling out, and the change is recent. If the final years of this decade are sounding the death-knell for the affair, the late Nineties and early Noughties were its zenith - and ever-cheaper technology was the fuel philanderers used to stoke the flames of desire. Increasingly available technology - cellphones, SMS messages, Internet connections, BlackBerrys and Bluetooth - made it easier than ever to make contact and stay in touch. "Technosexuals" used phones, email and the Internet to hook up with partners for easy encounters. Bluetooth allowed the unfaithful to pick out potential partners on trains and in bars. Research by the London School of Economics found that a quarter of mobile-phone users sent sexually explicit text messages, and one in six people flirted with someone who was not their partner via their phones.
As home PCs became affordable, huge numbers of the populace went online. Through websites such as Friends Reunited, we started to seek out long-forgotten friends, often for romantic reasons. The same story was played out in homes across the globe. Bored husbands and housewives, hypnotised by Windows 95 and the wonders of a 24-bit per second dial-up internet connection, would wobble along the information superhighway from the comfort of the spare bedroom, track down high-school sweethearts and start affairs. Six month later, the marriage would be over. Luddites didn't stand a chance.
It became easier than ever to find people to cheat with. At the same time, the logistics of an affair also became easier, thanks to burgeoning communications technology. The very structure of the way we communicate with each other changed. Personal mobile phones outsold home phones; text messaging abbreviations crept into standard language; kisses at the end of communications became common; emails replaced "snail mail" and then replaced telephone calls; and finally, face-to-face conversations diminished as office workers began emailing colleagues sitting next to them rather than speaking to them.
Snooping has never been easier - and this is just for the beginners. Surveillance technology is now so widely available that anyone can spy on a partner with gadgets and software that James Bond would be proud of. - The Independent