The producers of media have long toyed with its consumers. These hoaxes provide free marketing and sheer fun for media practitioners. What better way to get people to talk about your product than to create some sort of mystery surrounding it?
Lonelygirl15 first began her YouTube journey with this unassuming video:
YouTube viewers assumed that Bree was a vlogger (video blogger) just as many of them were. When Bree was revealed to be an actress by the name of Jessica Rose, many felt outraged. They watched these videos and reacted to Bree as if she were a real teenager talking to her webcam, not an actress filmed by a production team. Finding out that this "sixteen-year-old" was actually a nineteen-year-old disgusted many viewers. Of course, a controversy on this scale warrants international news. Though based in America, lonelygirl15's vlog reached across the world, so news stations from around the world picked up the story.
Why does this even matter? Who cares if this stranger on the internet isn't exactly who she says she is? At the time this phenomenon occurred, this is exactly how I thought because I didn't understand the sense of betrayal lonelygirl15's fans displayed. The actions by Jessica Rose and the producers, they felt, were completely unethical.
When people seek entertainment, they want to know the reasonable reaction one should have to the source. They want to know if what they are seeing is real. If it's fake, the media consumers aren't responsible for anything they see. They don't need to be truly concerned about any of the people they watch because those characters aren't real people to them anymore - they're only people pretending to be other people. This doesn't stop viewers from empathizing with characters, of course, but the characters don't have the same emotional grip on them that watching a real person does.
Bree did not explicitly state that she was a character, so people assumed she was a real person and cared for her like they would another human being rather than the figment of another's imagination. The producers purposely did this to exploit the attachment people feel for one another, especially the trust that comes with seeing another person talking directly to you. They involved lonelygirl15 personally with each viewer.
The producers may argue that they only launched lonelygirl15 this way to garner attention for it, and all the free publicity they received only proves them right. While I don't agree with their methods, their plan was ingenious. After all, why should someone suspect what another has to say on YouTube? They reason that these strangers posting videos have no reason to lie.
The controversy over lonelygirl15 just goes to show that media producers will do anything for more attention.
