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Freedonian Feminists and Knitting Society Web Ring
> For more than two years, a sizable group of internet users were caught up
> in the story of Kaycee Nicole. She was an attractive High School/College
> student dying from leukemia and she kept users updated via her online
> diary. Eventually her mom also started a companion diary to express the
> feelings associated with caring for a child with cancer. Many people became
> close friends with Kaycee Nicole through email, chatroom, and even phone
> conversations. When Kaycee finally succumbed, her online friends grieved
> like they had lost members of their own families. Well, there is one
> problem. Kaycee Nicole never existed.
>
Via The Gus, [1] the Kaycee Nicole (Swenson) FAQ [2]
This is an interesting case here. Fictional journals and diaries are nothing
new to literature (for instance, Bram Stoker's [3]Dracula [4] or even to the
web. But books (such as Dracula) are sold as fiction, and those that exist on
the web (such as The Gus' [5] Bobby the Eight-Year-Old Spanking Victim [6])
can be determined to be fake (or works of satire) if you care to look closely
enough and usually they're fairly static works, meaning that the author
rarely interacts with the audience. But in this case, “Kaycee” did indeed
interact with several people via email and over the phone so the author did
go to a somewhat extreme measure in the fictional account of a 19 year old
cancer victim.
The web is an interesting medium to work in, and one that I still feel hasn't
been fully exploited yet (to its full artistic measure, not economically) and
we probably won't see it coming unto its own for another ten to twenty years
yet. For instance, movies and television.
At first, both movies and television were nothing more than recording (or
broadcasting) of theater and it took awhile for artists to view the medium as
something other than a play or vaudvillian show. Movies were the first to
break away (in the “time from first use imitating an existing medium to
standing on its own as a new medium” sense) to its own conventions since the
filmmakers didn't immediately need an audience. Television took longer since
most of the early television broadcasts were done in front of a live studio
audience and all the televesion was used for was broadcasting the
entertainment to a larger audience than could normally be held in a theater
or sports arena.
It's odd that even though both mediums started from the same premise
(theater) and still use the same basics (to a degree) the two mediums are now
percieved to be different. Movies are more remote, more expressive (if you've
never seen Blade Runner on a movie screen, you're missing a lot!) than
television. Television is more intimate, warmer than movies are (due to the
amount of space available to show an image), immediate (it's easier to record
and edit on videotape than on film since there's no develop stage, or cutting
and splicing in the physical sense), and until recently, a lesser medium than
movies (it used to be that actors who started out in television and went to
movies were moving up, while going from movies to television was a sign of a
spiralling career). Movies are as distinct from television as it is from
theater.
We're still working out the new means of expressions and asthetics that are
available on the web. Is Kaycee pointing us toward a direction where taking
on a new identity or persona can be an artistic expression? (Much like Andy
Kaufman [7] did with Tony Clifton [8]). Can we expect to see several
interacting journals for a whole community of non-existant people?
(Freedonian Feminists and Knitting Society anyone?)
Is anyone still reading this at all?
[1]
http://spies.com/~gus/ran/0105/010521.htm
[2]
http://rootnode.org/article.php?sid=26
[3]
http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Authors/about_bram_stoker.html
[4]
http://www.literature.org/authors/stoker-bram/dracula/
[5]
http://www.spies.com/~gus/
[6]
http://www.angelfire.com/va/nicekid
[7]
http://andykaufman.jvlnet.com/
[8]
http://andykaufman.jvlnet.com/tonyc.htm
Email author at
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