Does Your Reader Know?

A friend of mine had a blog for just under a year about life and love. She has 300 regular readers towards the end, who sometimes commented on what she wrote. The blog talked openly about the goings on in life.

On YouTube, the user Lonelygirl15 added her first video blog in June last year. In the blog she talks about things in her life, like my friend in her text blog. Lonelygirl15’s blog became a huge success and millions of people watched it.

These two blogs have one thing in common in that they are utterly fake. My friend made up a character that she writes about, much like she has always been writing stories. Lonelygirl15 was an actor hired by three aspiring script writers, who wanted to use a new and interesting media to tell a story.

In September, Lonelygirl15 was revealed and many fans were really upset by the fact that it was all a lie. Some comments on the revelation videos are more along the lines of ‘haha, told ya’, but some seem genuinely hurt.

So, the questing is: is it right to lie about yourself in blogs? And if you do, should you ever tell anyone?

I’m not really sure if I like fake blogs. On the one hand, it’s an interesting medium to write in. Most sincere diary blogs are pretty boring, so a fake one could provide more entertainment. On the other hand, people who read or watch blogs can become emotionally invested in the author, who after a while can seem a bit like a friend – those people could be hurt by finding out their ‘friend’ was a fictional character. If you reason from a ‘happiness maximizing’ standpoint, however, the entertainment you give your readers by faking might outweigh the possible anger that could surface if they found out it was all fake.

If you have a fake blog and get a bit tired of it, you have to decide what to do about it. Should you just leave it and never tell any of the readers why you stopped writing? Should you write a “goodbye” post and say you decided to stop writing? And if so, should you in that post ‘out’ yourself?

In the case of Lonelygirl15, when she was ‘outed’, many people were, as I previously wrote, upset. The question is, is knowing the truth better than being blissfully ignorant?

I wish I had a good answer to that. In this case the question might not be very big, or important, but there are many other situations to which the basic question can be applied. I have always in theory leaned towards the harsh truth, but I can’t say it’s always the best choice, or that being brutally honest it is the ‘right thing’ to do.