As pointed out in TechCrunch and later referred to in my Steven Slater article, Jenny the “HOPA/HPOA” dry erase board girl is yet another in a series of hoaxes by the makers of the $10,000 Trump Tip (see FoxNews) and Teen Texting Disaster (see Inquisitr) hoaxes, John and Leo Resig. “Jenny” reportedly sent a series of dry erase board images to her small brokerage office as a means of quitting her job. In the messages, she made it very clear she was quitting due to her sexist, foul-smelling boss, whom she exposed as a chronic office time waster.
It would have been a creative way to walk off a job, if any of it had been true. According to Long Island Press, Jenny is actually actress Elyse Porterfield, and the hoax, reportedly done for entertainment purposes, helped drive traffic to the Chive via Facebook shares (238,000) and Tweets (31,000, according to TechCrunch),To discover more information on internet meme, you’ve to check out our website.
From the famous “Piltdown Man” archaeological hoax of 1912 on, people want to believe the more extraordinary things we hear from friends, families, or things we’ve read to be real, in particular if we’ve read it from something we consider to be a reliable source. If you have access to the Internet, you’ve probably been hoaxed at some point or another.
Snopes.com has become an increasingly useful resource for those of us who wonder if that e-mail Mom or our co-worker forwarded is a real hunt for a tragically missing girl or if that guy in the picture e-mailed to us actually did the incredibly stupid thing they did (hint: probably not). Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters has also done a solid service in proving whether various urban legends, including those Internet and videos sourced, are plausible or wholly false.
Sometimes, as in the case of Jenny, if it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t true. LonelyGirl15 was an early YouTube phenomenon later proven to be a fraud. The apparently normal 16-year old named “Bree” was a popular poster on the site who liked to share ordinary challenges in her life, challenges that became stranger and stranger as she began discussing the occult. When she began talking about her parent’s membership in an actual cult and their eventual disappearance, fans started to become concerned. According to Guyism.com, an L.A. Times reporter began to investigate the situation, only to find Bree was actually a 19-year-old actress named Jessica Rose, working for a studio currently known as EQAL.
It seems the trick to successfully pulling off an Internet hoax is to make sure the trick, like having a rich person drop off an overly generous tip or a young girl accidentally texting her father far too much personal info, needs to seem plausible. If it makes a good story, people will want to share it, and, if it isn’t harming anyone, tall tales can entertain. Those who take fiction for fact simply need to remember the old adage: You can’t believe everything you read.