Do you like his haircut?

At first, things were quite simple. You looked like your mamma and your papa made you, and, change of attire excepted, looked more or less the same in front of your boss, your friends, or your family.

Then came the internet. And, suddenly, you could become anyone you wanted. As Steiner famously noted in his New Yorker cartoon, in 1993, nobody would know if you are a dog. And do people took advantage of this. One of the first instances of clear adoption of a totally new identity was in 1982, in the early days of Compuserve when a male psychiatrist named Sanford Lewin took on the identity of a female neuropsychologyst (insider joke, probably) named Joan. Inconsistencies in Joan's stories had Lewin discovered.
Today, everybody is changing their self-presentation to take full advantage of the mystification allowed by the electronic mediation. Just take a look at random MySpace or Facebooks: everyone looks like an American Apparel model.

Now, stay tuned, because we add another dimension: people falsely pretending to be other people, while having their audience lose their mind over who they really are, offline (if one could say that there still is such a thing as a offline / online boundary, which is another story). Here, of course, the Fake Steve Jobs, hilarious and apparently almost as self-satisfied as the real one, comes to mind.

Last but not least is when our story comes full circle: real people pretending to be other people, but in fact acting for them, really. Hum? The idea is quite simple: imagine that you could hire yourself as your best PR and then inundate the internet with lavish stories of yourself (see the already infamous "I like Mackey's haircut. I think he looks cute!" by Rahoded, the alias used by none other than Mackey himself, WholeFoods' CEO) or criticize your competitors almost with impunity.
And now for the word of the day - because there has to be a word for such a thing, we are talking about the English language lafter all - this behavior is called "sock-pupetting".

Apparently, in the business and political world, the practice is becoming quite common. All right, then, what is left for us to do but play hide and seek with everybody else?