Cliff Jennings, lonelygirl15: We're all playing characters anyway, so why the fuss?

I must have been napping during the class on ethics in marketing, because I don’t understand the reason for the furor over the Cliff Jennings/Idols saga in South Africa. This has happened before, is happening as I sit here and will certainly become more prevalent in the future.

In May 2006, a 1:32 webcam video on YouTube titled “Dorkiness prevails” was posted under the pseudonym “lonelygirl15”. The first video wasn’t particularly memorable, but it was the start of what was to become a regular vlog that would attract millions of YouTube viewers to the digital musings of a 16-year-old named “Bree” who lived in a small town, had strict parents that seemed to belong to a strange religious sect and enjoyed “geeky” things like the work of physicist Richard Feynman.

Four months, many episodes and millions of views later, the world found out what some viewers had already suspected — that lonelygirl15 was a work of fiction, the work of screenwriter Mesh Flinders, aspirant director Miles Beckett, 19-year-old actress Jessica Rose, and Amanda Goodfried (who handled all Bree’s written correspondence with fans on YouTube and MySpace).

At first, lonelygirl15’s viewer community and the online community in general were devastated and angry — they had been duped into following a work of fiction as if it were reality! They had wasted their time corresponding with a character and its writers! Rants, raves, disturbing comments and thrashing about followed all over the internet, but almost a year later, and with the first season of lonelygirl15 under the belt (and a spin-off on Bebo.com called KateModern), it still has 101 064 subscribers and 12 883 711 channel views on YouTube.

Sounds strangely familiar? Cliff Jennings was a character created by little-known actor Eduan van Jaarsveldt and Ogilvy Johannesburg to add some entertainment value to the early auditions portion of the fourth Idols television series in South Africa. Van Jaarsveldt — for those of you who have been living in a cave over the past few months — played the character of Cliff Jennings, a big-dreaming singer-songwriter who went to all the Idols auditions, despite relentless abuse from the judges at each attempt and a clear lack of talent in either the singing or songwriting department.

What was not clear at the time that Jennings received coverage on the Idols television broadcasts was that he was a fictional character and, in fact, even the judges have said that they were not aware that he was just a fictional character when he auditioned for them on camera.

The Cliff Jennings character now has only 202 friends on MySpace, and the Facebook profile is no longer publicly viewable. I understand from media reports that Van Jaarsveldt still receives abusive mail as a result of playing the Jennings character on Idols. Where did this marketing experiment go pear-shaped?

The concept behind someone creating an alternative public persona for an interactive entertainment medium is not unique to Cliff Jennings — the web is a particularly good example of an entertainment medium where the lines between reality and fiction are blurring. The future promises to be one where there is a marked difference between our public and private personae — our profiles on Google, Facebook or MySpace are not who we are, but they are a representation of what we put out there as the way that we want the public to perceive us and, in turn, how it is received.

Like it or not, we’re all becoming minor (some not so minor) celebrities, capable of being recognised by people who follow our every online meanderings & musings, and whom we’ve probably never met.

Have you ever noticed that a person’s Facebook profile only contains info about the good things in their lives that they wish to project, never a picture of their average house in an average neighbourhood or their average car or a note about how disappointed or depressed they are about something? (OK, I do actually have someone that I am connected to who does that, but that person is an exception!).

Similarly, with blogs and vlogs — even though I love reading and commenting on some blogs and I think that I have at least an intellectual connection with those bloggers — I am still only communicating with the public persona that the blogger has intentionally or unintentionally created. So in this brave new world, what is real and what is fiction when almost everything that we do online nowadays is at least partly fictitious and certainly misleading? Online, we are all playing a character.

And so finally I return to the Idols context with the analogy of our private and public personae. A few years ago, a friend of mine auditioned for Idols, despite it being totally out of character for him to do something quite so potentially embarrassing, in such a public way.

By all independent accounts, his audition didn’t go very well and to this day I don’t believe that he really thought that he had that X-factor that was going to make him a singing contest winner. That didn’t stop him — he was determined to make an impression! A lack of singing talent notwithstanding, he got heaps of television coverage then and more again recently as M-Net and Idols included him in their television ads of the worst singers for that season.

Sure enough, he became the staple topic of conversation in his group of friends, people began to recognise him in the street and Eric “The Singer” was born. Check out this short audition clip and you tell me — Cliff Jennings, lonelygirl15, KateModern, Eric “The Singer”: is there still room in interactive entertainment for a line to be drawn between what is real and what is fiction, and does it really matter any longer?