Look at How Easy It Is to Fool a Girlblogger

The sacrificial lamb of online authenticity for creativity.

Identity online is more or less accepted as some radical art-form, wading through the liminality that is the performance of authenticity. We curate our personas as carefully as we can, and in the process, we learn to accept that others’ lives are curated as well. The disconnect between the Internet and reality is always the first lesson in online safety courses. Previously, though, the online world was perhaps a kind of democratic utopia, functioning as a tool through which people could find genuine connection. As general suspicions of online ‘characters’ rise, we disregard the intentions of previous Internet communities which revolved around genuineness.

The rise of YouTube in the 2000s ushered in the era of the online video, condemning text-based platforms such as MySpace which famously became defunct. The everyday became a site for discussion in the form of informal vlogs, the online sphere aligning with the new sincerity movement, emphasising candour and expression of mundane joy across artistic disciplines. The vlogs were associated with specific video styles, including low-quality gear, jump cuts, poor lighting and camera angle – any signification that the piece was created by and for the average online citizen. The webcam vlog was the medium of the people.

Enter Lonelygirl15. In 2006, Bree Avery, a homeschooled sixteen-year-old pushed her way into the new vlogging scene, immediately asserting her identity as one that was de facto authentic. Her videos featured the classic substandard production value, as well as language that was typical of this style of video – she is regularly self-deprecating, appears unsure of herself, and even engages in de-lurking by shouting out other active vloggers of the era. Using these techniques, Bree entered the network of video pioneers and built a following. Relatability was a crucial point of appeal for audiences in the early vlog scene, and audiences related to Bree – on all accounts, her life was ordinary, and her videos provided comfort to her avid audience during her rise to fame.

You can imagine the outrage that ensued when it was revealed that Lonelygirl15 was, essentially, a hoax. As discovered by a group of discerning (and stalker-y) fans, Bree Avery had never been real. She was played by an actress, her lines fed to her from a script, her setup was carefully curated by a production team. Although this does not sound so far fetched to contemporary audiences, the violation of the use of this medium and platform so centred around authenticity at the time was unheard of. In her book ‘Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction, Page describes a series of “conventions of self expression associated with sincerity” which are present in the early Lonelygirl15 videos, including the script, production, and line delivery techniques previously mentioned. EQAL, the production company behind the character, replicated that which was conventional of ‘true’ vloggers, building an ethos of candour to manufacture credibility in favour of altering perceptions of Lonelygirl15. The joke regarding the irony of Lonelygirl15’s alignment with new sincerity as a vlogger writes itself, as the movement famously rejects irony itself. Despite the fact that Bree never claimed to be real, the violation of this new and perverse use of the vlog perhaps permanently altered the trajectory of the purposes of YouTube, and other online video platforms.

This becomes evident almost a decade later in the response to another hoax in 2015. Dreampop band Beach House had supposedly appeared on a podcast revealing a new single, titled Helicopter Dreams (I’m Awake). Compared with the drawn-out, large-scale nature of the Lonelygirl15 scandal, the Beach House hoax was open and closed incredibly quickly with a statement from the band denying their involvement in the production of the single. Even so, the lack of unrest from the community is notable, particularly since when searching for information on this single, all that remains online are a few articles and fan forums discussing the song as though it were real. Trawling through the Wayback Machine archives will reward the avid researcher with a singular shoddily-written Gawker article, ‘Look at How Easy It Is to Fool a Blogger’, reflecting on the unstable nature of information sources within the music industry – aside from this, there is little to no discussion of the hoax itself. At some point across the decade, and again during the decade that was to come, we became desensitised to the proliferation of deception across the Internet.

This laissez-faire response to inauthenticity, when compared with the scandal status of Lonelygirl15, strikes me as unnerving. Somewhere in the decade between these events, the denizens of the Internet have lost their fear of online deception. Perhaps we have even come to expect it. The events surrounding Lonelygirl15 warped the online landscape built on YouTube, and spilled outward into peripheral online communities, creating and enlarging a common suspicion of other users of the Internet. Of course, Lonelygirl15 did not mark the first lie ever told online – this event was no fall from grace. However, the hoax functioned as an invasion of a previously authenticity-based medium, permanently altering the online video landscape. The early YouTube community was incredibly tightly-knit, a key difference to the fragmented online world of today. Lonelygirl15 planted seeds of distrust within the community that remain manifest.

Now, lies on the Internet are a separate and many-headed beast. We lie in the name of curating some semblance of selfhood. Perhaps Lonelygirl15 was merely the beginning of a shift towards the perception of online identity as more malleable than the tangible in-person identity, particularly as identity begins to be dominantly asserted through the purchase of consumer goods. We see these issues surrounding identity exploited by groups such as scientology, luring people in with the promise of a personality test. We are desperate to be told who we are. Online, though, it becomes easier, and more acceptable, to craft an online persona which perhaps does not align with one’s identity in reality. The Internet becomes increasingly fragmented, and we explore stories, personas, and identities by exploring them through falsehoods online. Although Lonelygirl15’s perversion of authenticity permanently subverted the norms surrounding the Internet, we are now able to escape into a creative abyss defined by deception. Even Bree herself eventually became the first ever science fiction web series. Perhaps in this case, ‘experimentation’ is a more apt descriptor for our actions than ‘deception’.

Internet hoaxes become increasingly less rare, and yet, as online communities split and become echo chambers, particular case studies become increasingly less widespread. Even so, we approach the online sphere with a constant awareness of the threat of deception, to the point at which we are unsurprised and even vindicated when a hoax does occur. “I always knew there was something off about them,” we proudly announce in the face of falsehoods. At least in online artistic spheres, the status of new sincerity becomes questionable, as satire runs rampant in the face of fragmentation. I wonder if we have lost forever the value of authenticity online in favour of exploration of new ventures.