90 Day Jane
An ego-romping record of an anonymous wouldbe suicide, this blog -- and its lone YouTube video -- posts daily, counting down to its author's zero hour. This is tech'd-out macabre, with comments. And widgets. And comment threads. Could be a hoax. Could be viral marketing. Could be an artist. But in the meantime, the video's drawn almost 28,000 views. Natch, it boasts an alluringly half-naked, mightly be-nippled, raven-haired hottie.
How very Hollywood. Like the latest dunderheaded tech-pocalypse, Untraceable, in which a net savvy bogeyman rigs a death machine to his site's traffic stats. The more people visit, the quicker his victim dies. Could we have the opposite here? The more people visit, the less likely Jane is to suck a tailpipe. Or however people kill themselves these days. By being anonymous, probs.
All too meticulous to me. The photo too pretty. The posts too confessional, too many office details that would tip off coworkers. And too clean. Real suicides are so much less elegant. A fiver says this is promo marketing for a new video series. Color me suckered. And annoyed.
90 Day Jane | YouTube Vid
I cannot comment on this version, but the idea of doing a countdown to death has been done before, but the British comedian Christopher Morris, writing as Richard Geefe, in his fake column Time To Go for The Observer in the late 1990s.
It was printed 'straight' by the paper, and generated a lot of comment, before they revealed that it was fake.
http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~cow/studio/geefe.html
Posted by: DanC | February 13, 2008 at 05:54 AM
Y'know, I think I remember reading about that back in j-school. Thanks. There was also another suicide blog a few years ago, but its name escapes me.
BTW, seems like Radar's got the dish on 90 Day Jane being a hoax: http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/02/90-day-jane-a-living-breathing-hoax.php
Posted by: Steve Bryant | February 13, 2008 at 11:41 AM