Much as I hate to perpetuate memes like this, the whole saga of YouTube’s lonelygirl15 has just hit Metafilter. Basically, someone has posted a bunch of video diaries to YouTube purporting to be a young homeschooled girl with ultra-religious parents. She’s having drama with a boy, and she appears to be involved in some satanic cult.
If it’s not fake, I will surely print out this blog post and eat it. It’s too well produced, too ‘instantly popular’, too well written and altogether too pat. My top two theories are that it’s a promotion for a movie (follow the links on the Mefi post) or it’s an ‘original drama’ for YouTube. I feel slightly depressed that people would even entertain the possibility that the video diaries are genuine, but then again most probably aren’t as sensitised to ‘fake’ fiction as I’ve inevitably become.
I’ve posted a few times in the Metafilter thread with more thoughts – just scroll down to see them.
mssv 
I don’t know I you have followed the story of LonelyGirl15 further, but for now, another parralel plot (“Cassie is watching”) has risen that seems to be an assumed ARG. What I wanted to ask you, Grand Master (or actually, the only one I know where to ask the question) of the Alternate Reality, is, do you think that this game is a well “written” one, one that is prepared and will eventually have an happy ending, or one that will be a basic failure of a non-skilled puppetmaster ?
Well, it ‘ended’ (if you can call it that) a few days ago with the PMs making a post on a fan forum saying ‘Yeah, it’s all fiction, and we’re going to make films now’ or some such. Pretty disappointing really – they had hundreds of thousands of people eating out of their hands, huge mainstream media coverage, and they went and just shattered the illusion.
Let’s face it – people weren’t watching it for the brilliant acting or luminous writing, they were watching it because they wanted to know who was behind it and whether it was real. At least they could’ve done a good reveal – instead they’ve left people with a bad taste in their mouths, and a distrust of similar videos. Oh well.