Fishburn Hedges

11.08.2010

Another day, another internet meme whooshes by and probably 99 per cent of the world doesn’t even notice.

It turns out that, just 24 hours after her actions took social media by storm, Jenny the “DryWipe” girl is a hoax.

Jenny, you ask? Who’s she?  In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, let me very briefly outline what’s happened (if you know, skip this section).

Who is Jenny the DryWipe girl?

 So yesterday, pictures swept the internet of Jenny, a former broker who quit her job (and her appalling boss) by writing messages on a dry-wipe board, and emailing the photos to her colleagues. You can see the photos here.

Only Jenny didn’t do this. An actress called Elyse Porterfield did, as part of an inspired, and well-executed internet hoax. The brothers behind the hoax are not new to this - Leo and John Resig were behind the 2007 hoax story that Donald Trump had left a $10,000 tip in a Santa Monica restaurant, which duped such august media outlets as Fox News. So they have form.

The response in the blogosphere

Most bloggers and tweeters seem to be taking this in their stride, chuckling about the cleverness of the hoax, or expressing their disappointment that it was not real. But, even in this new world of fragmenting media and disorderly communication, doesn’t this extraordinary event raise real questions about the integrity of the information we receive?

Suckered by a lack of research

According to the brothers, this was about entertainment, as explained in this follow-up set of photos by Elyse which was published this morning (Wednesday). But one comment John Resig made to tech blog/magazine TechCrunch was this:

"We didn’t do this for the media. I’d (sic) did it almost to prove to myself that I had it in me, to make something go viral at 4:30 in the morning before the world wakes up. You get a pure thrill of watching your site go from 15,000 uniques to 440,000 uniques in a single hour, watching yourself sucker every site from a-z who didn’t do their backstory."

The value of journalism

This gets to the heart of what is inevitably lost as people shift away from journalism to “word of mouth” as a primary source of news and information. The insinuation behind Resig’s comment is that new rising media stars – blogs such as TechCrunch or the Huffington Post – may depend less on doing “their backstory”, and more on making information public, then reacting in realtime to the response and updating as required.

Perhaps the new media magnates have taken the mantra to “publish and be damned” more literally than it was meant. After all, that was in response to a threat of blackmail, rather than call to action by a newspaper editor.