Friday 10 April 2009

She made up a life - but why?

On an online forum I frequent, we recently had a bit of a debacle regarding a new member. This forum is a fashion forum, and has a number of threads revolving around the lines of "what outfit I wore today" - and new member (lets call her horse&dog shall we?) started posting in it a few weeks ago.

from what we could gather, she was an 18yr old year 12er, living alone (???) in a house in melbourne, who had mega rich parents who lived in a farm on the outskirts of melbourne, a horse-dog and a dog-horse (even she couldnt keep this bit straight), and a wardrobe out of net-a-porter. She owned a brand new range rover, and said that her parents didn't pay for her wardrobe, and that she paid for it herself by working at maccas (her first reply) and a few replies later this changed to "I work at a boutique". Mcdonalds is a bit different to a boutique, but ok, maybe the poor thing was just a bit confused.

Now you may be wondering why I am talking about this at all, but think about this; more and more we are an online society - sure we meet in real life (IRL), but we use facebook to set up events, we set up blind dates online, and we find support groups and make friendships online; often at forums for people with common interests, like said forum at which this incident happened. When this is the case, and people with fake personas come into play, it can be very damaging to peoples trust, and affects other people who may be more genuine.

As it was, I think most people who read horse&dogs posts realised that she was a bit far fetched - most of us were waiting to hear that her bf was a well known footy/rugby player (inside joke). What is ridiculous though is how much she protested when we gently questioned her; instant giveaway.

Moral of the story? If you're gonna make up a fake persona, get the details right, and maybe write it down so you can remember it too. Oh, and dont say your entire wardrobe is 5000$ dresses from NAP. No one has this, unless you're victoria beckham.

4 comments:

emsydo said...

HAHHA. i didn't know vogue forum had such loonies.
it's pretty much become the social norm to meet IRL with ppl from the internet.

Anonymous said...

Ahhhh.... now i know what going on. I'm a mushroom no longer!

Iya said...

WHAT WAS THE INCIDENT??? dammit!!

Mulsifid said...

i once met a girl who claimed she surfs, few conversations later it turned to 'well im jus tryin to stand up on the board u know, sometimes i can...' and then i wanted to go surfin with her and she was like 'i pierced my belly button so it might get infected.' hello? how stupid can u get? wen u pierce u are actually advised to clean the area with salt water. lol.

ur post reminded me of this incident. :)