I found this report on Global Voices very interesting. I’m not very familiar with the Brazilian blogworld — the lusosphere — but this week the big story from the big country in South America is about a Brazilian blogger who faked her own death, apparently because her blog presence was part of a study about social behaviour on the world wide web. The whole thing is found here, but here are a few excerpts:
… 2007 started with the Lusosphere being surprised by the announcement of the death of a well known blogger. MEG [Maria Elisa Guimarães] became famous as the editor of SubRosa, one of the first-generation blogs in Brazil, and also because of her relentless promotion of conversation among bloggers through an active and warm-hearted commenting and emailing activity. The eulogies performed throughout the Lusosphere gained a great deal of attention as MEG was darling to many of the first A-list Brazilian bloggers. Never-the-less, something peculiar about Meg’s announced death kept ringing in some of her closest friends.
and:
The first report about the presumed fatality appeared in a post [’My Woman Died’] from Paulo José Miranda, a Portuguese blogger who writes as if he were Meg’s husband, despite confessing that they met in person only once(!), during a weekend in Sao Paulo. There were details of a diagnosed cancer in Meg and a trip to New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital for specialized treatment. Contradictory signals started to arise when some bloggers found out that the IP address used by Meg in her ‘last’ posts and comments was not from a US ISP, but it was instead coming from some place covered by Telemar Norte, a company providing Internet access to the northern region of Brazil. Reactions to the growing evidence that Meg’s death was a hoax, and that she was now online with another name [Tereza Quetzal] turned a mourning blogosphere into a crossfire of judgments.
and:
The warning I make – as long as warnings have any practical usefulness — is: our blog is not our world, and is not our soul, and even less our heart. Our blog is just a space where we publish fragments of what we are. If we take it too seriously, it — the blog — will “kill†us, even though virtually. A big hug to you, Ina, and be sure to never be killed, ok?
and:
I have some information that I consider very accurate in relation to the facts. Meg is doing a study about human behavior in the Blogosphere. She is doing that and will soon launch a book which, according to my source, will be very good and enlightening. It can really provide an excellent x-ray about human behavior. When they heard that she died, everybody was praising her, she was the best person in the world, and now everything is quite the inverse. I’ve already ordered mine.
{ 2 comments }
hello from warsaw, poland! i found your comment on the global voices site:
i agree, this is such an fascinating post! i was reminded of the ‘lonely girl’ hoax on youtube while reading this…perhaps meg got too caught up in her popularity and found it hard to simply unplug, or as someone said above, she was addicted to the virtual affection…i am reminded of very famous pop stars like ‘jacko’ for example, who are as much of a creation of their fans as they are self-created…
on the other hand, we have the issues of lying and deception i think…if we must assume that all bloggers are not whom they seem, this would surely undermine the trust that a community needs to thrive,
…so i think meg’s behavior could not be universalized as a rule for everyone, hence it’s immoral…she had unfair power over others, she duped people (even if she made them feel good), and she may have even damaged her own sense of personal integrity…
do you think meg’s behavior was moral? why?
I don’t know whether to call it moral or not. I do know that it’s interesting. What is it about the internet that allows people to believe that the contacts that we make over it are real — or at any rate, as real as the contacts we make face to face? And why should we be surprised at a hoax? I tend to assume that most people are hiding something when they log on; what you put online is the result of a process of choice and selection, no matter how you slice it.
I’m not convinced that the internet is a place where community can thrive, you see; I believe that we can create the illusion of a community. But because we are in control of the information we put on a blog, that’s all it is — an illusion.
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