A Faux Blogger and her predecessors

I found Medical Pathetical through Flea.  As did Moof.  I wrote about A Call for Healing.

And Moof felt very close to TNT, Medical Pathetical's author.

This sweet, bubbly, humorous, intelligent, irrepressible little lady had become the front and center of my everything over this last week … adopted daughter, worry focus - because she’d been sick since the 22nd, and I was so worried for her health, and center of my courage … a position in which we should probably never put another human being. I’m sorry that I was so selfish.

It turns out that TNT was not who she said she was.

There was Kaycee Nicole Swenson  in 2000-2001

In 2003,  isabella v., began a blog called she.saflightrisk.org.  Esquire Magazine ran a long story by John H. Richardson, which concludes

Isabella is real.

I think.

There was Plain Layne.  Kottke's take. The gig was up in 2004;  the real author was Odin Soli, an old friend of Mitch's:

"Plain Layne" provided the things all good literature provides: revelation, little nuggets of some big truths, some insights we'd be poorer without. Through its interactive nature, though, it also provided instant gratification of that human need to reach out, and get reached out to. And like so many internet romance stories, it was an intimacy that was as facile as it was instant.

There was Belle de Jour--a hoax or the real thing?  My money was on the hoax.

In a July 29, 2004  article on blog hoaxes, Daniel Terdiman  writes:

'It kind of takes the old phenomenon of literary hoaxes a step further, where you're interacting with these authors day by day,'' said Alex Boese, who runs the Museum of Hoaxes, an online compendium of urban legends and other fakery. ''And it's so easy to hide your identity online and to hide the contextual clues that people would need to find out who you are.''

It seems that blogs are still new enough that skepticism about their authenticity has not yet set in.

[snip]

One reason that many people put faith in such blogs may be a desire to escape a mundane daily existence. But unlike the films and movies that people rely on to transport themselves, blogs offer an actual give-and-take with the authors.

''Part of it is a kind of wish fulfillment of the reader,'' Mr. Boese said. ''They're presented with this exciting personality that they get to interact with. And they want the person to not be the same kind of boring person that they are.''

It was widely thought that Where is Raed, written by Salam Pax, was a hoax.  It wasn't.

In 2004, Amanda Doerty as Hot Ambercrombie Chick.  Cameron Marlow wrote:

The notion that this attractive college freshman was spending all of her time trolling weblogs looking for exposed weblogs seemed implausable to me. But looking through the comments themselves, it appeared that most, if not all, were at least marginally on topic. In addition Abercrombie Chick was interacting with hundreds of commenters on her own site, and doing quite a good job of it. A person this prolific would have to be unemployed and completely focused, which anyone who has been unemployed knows is impossible.

Something was amiss, and I had to prove that Hot Abercrombie Chick was either a) a totally different girl, b) a guy or c) some team of people creating an identity. And I was devoted to outing this fraud.

And he was beaten to the punch.

In February 2005, there was the case of Libertarian Girl, busted by Catallarchy

Comments

[Nickie]

This issue has been one I've contemplated multipple times. Annonimity and hiding context can be good when it's designed to keep one safe. For example, I try to hide details online for personal safety. But, it can also be dangerous in the sense that one never knows who they are interacting with for sure. We often forget that it can happen in the real world as well.