Rethinking Rethinking Representation: Lonelygirl15

Lonelygirl15 exploited the genre of the teenage girl webcam confessional to create an extended transmedia narrative. But before the story became widely known, "Bree's" webcam dispatches (like the one above, which originally didn't have the cheesy little link floating at the bottom) seemed strangely authentic. In the early weeks of the project, the YouTube community was unsure whether or not Bree was real. The comments on the teen's vlog posts became a part of the story, and the two-way, mirrored nature of the webcam format -- including its associations with feminist and minority empowerment -- became a means of deploying the various narrative figures that were needed to set up the larger story (which turned out to be more than a little bit silly).

How does this kind of hoax-turned-soap-opera fit into Michelle White's vision of "...how women webcam operators have renegotiated their societal visibility, controlled their images, and decided to be visible"? (84) Has the creeping cancer of the antiauthentic (hello, Alex Juhasz) ended the brief moment of intimacy and empowerment brought about by the webcam? Or is there another act to follow?