90 Day Jane, Real Or A Project?

Flumesday has recently posted that Suicide Blogger 90 Day Jane herself posted that this was, basically, a hoax. Or maybe a project? What I find interesting is, Flumesday might be one of the few (or only one?) to have seen this final post. 90 Day Jane posted her final post last night and left it up for a few hours before taking her blog offline. The name Dan sticks out as well. This could really be a coincidence, absolutely, but what do you think?  Did you see the final post by 90dayjane that Flumesday is referring to? She was getting thousands of hits. In only a week she had over 200,000 hits. I was up late last night and I didn’t see it. It’s not in Google’s cache (yet?) that I can find.

Here is what Flumesday is stating occured. For reasons that will be really, really clear in a moment, I’ll place Flumesday’s article , which evidently included part of 90 Day Jane’s final post, here for you, then we’ll move on for more. Flumesday is in italics, and 90dayjane is further blockquoted:

My friend Dan drew my attention to a truly morbid yet fascinating blog from a girl who calls herself “90 Day Jane.” The premise of the site is that she will commit suicide in 90 days, and is blogging each day leading up to her supposed death. Like any curious person, I went to the site and read a few of the posts. I was struck by the “About Me” section of the page. Here it is:

I am going to kill myself in 90 days. What else should i say? This blog is not a cry for help or even to get attention. It’s simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I’m not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to? I mean, as an atheist I feel life has no greater purpose. My generation has had no great depression, no great war and our biggest obstacle is beating Halo 3. So, if I feel like saying “game over”, why can’t I? Anyway, I hope you enjoy my thoughts as the clock runs out. Also, if blogspot takes this down before i’m gone just go to www.90dayjane.com. Please don’t attempt to “help” me. If you want to truly help, please send me ideas on how to do the deed. thx-Jane

Like any site you hear about from a friend, there are thousands of other “friends” out there telling their friends, and your friend is surely not the first friend to tell their friends. Usually by the time I hear about something, it’s already a hit. Looking at the number of comments on Jane’s posts, her site was a hit. So much so, that three of her last five daily posts touched on the tremendous response her site was getting. On Day 87, the fourth day of the blog, she wrote:

I didn’t expect this kind of response, or really any response at all. To be honest, i’m kind of freaked but I also feel a sense of responsibility to continue the blog. I started it to be a public record of my suicide, but i thought it would be after the fact. I also wanted to use this blog to help answer the question of “why” for anyone who knew me and also for myself. Your comments are certainly helping me do that- many of them in a good way.

In only a week of publishing, Jane received hundreds of comments on each of her posts, the type of response any blogger dreams of. The comments range from concern, doubt, contempt, empathy to outright abuse. My favorite that I read came on the eighth day when one commenter wrote, “Can you make it nine day Jane? Seriously. Attention whore. But either way, before you die, can you post pix of your clam?”

I discussed with Dan whether or not Jane truly intended to commit suicide or whether she was creating some sort of social experiment to see how truly evil people could be on the internet. As in, would people really call a girl who had 83 days to live an “attention whore?” Or ask to see pictures of her “clam”? And if this chick was seriously disturbed and was actually going to kill herself, how could I laugh at any of this? The whole thing was just captivating.

Most of me, however, believed it was a hoax, and late Tuesday night, right before I started writing this post, my suspicions were confirmed, by 90 Day Jane herself. Apparently overwhelmed by the attention paid to her site, Jane posted “Day 0: The Resolve” which let her readers know that she was, in fact, merely testing all of us, had no intentions of committing suicide and that the joke had gone too far.Phew, because I actually did giggle at the “clam” comment.

90 Day Jane cited a conflict between her “massive sense of responsibility to my art” and the readers of the blog. Here is an excerpt from her final post:

My closeness to this project must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours.

90DayJane was meant to mirror the tragic figure, Christine Chubbuck. Newscaster Christine Chubbuck committed suicide in 1974 by shooting herself in the head live on air. She was very vocal about her depression to those around her and gave every indication of her exact intentions leading up to the event. Sadly, no one reacted or helped Christine and those left behind could only ask “why”.

Her story both inspired and terrified me because I can truly empathize with her rage and even her isolation. I wondered how Christine’s life and subsequent suicide would play out in our time. Would the internet be yet another place of isolation to her or an escape?

Well, it was good while it lasted. And whether or not 90 Day Jane was merely, as Radar put it in a story Tuesday, a “viral marketing scheme for some amateur auteur’s inspiration” or an actual homage to Chubbuck, the experiment did yield a noteworthy result. 90 Day Jane proves that no matter how depressed, disturbed, or downtrodden a girl is, there will always be one, if not many internet commenters ready to pummel her with lewd sex jokes.

Now, onto the name DAN.
There was someone that was on the 90dayjane site this morning (my time - United States) (… after it was down) that accessed it via their hard drive; the name to their “My Documents” is DAAN. Sure, they could have saved the website itself to their hard drive at an earlier point in time. Maybe not. They looked to be using a proxy. There were several hits to the page via telenet.be while this same user, who was also using telenet.be, was on.

I took screenshots from SiteMeter; Clicking on each thumbnail will give you a larger view:

In the HUGE possibility that it really is just a coincidence, I searched for some blogs not written in English since no other English speaking blogs had that last post by 90dayjane.

I found this one right here on wordpress that has more of 90dayjane’s final post, and it reads somewhat differently than the one above. It also reads like Jane does indeed, at the very least, need a very close friend right now.

90DayJane is a personal art piece about me. It was meant for me and (what I ignorantly thought would be) a small number of people who might find it on BlogSpot. It is the result of me tapping into the darkest part of myself and seeing where it led.

What I have written and filmed, at its core, is from a place of truth. I am the girl in the videos. I have great disappointment with my generation and its obvious obsession with celebrity culture rather than their fellow man, thus the former Chuck Palahniuk reference.

I wanted this blog to be about personal discovery and truth. But the correspondences I have received have taught me more about those qualities than I could ever express. 90DayJane has become its own entity and has influenced me. In fact, it has changed my perspective as a human being.

I feel a massive sense of responsibility to my art, but more importantly the readers of this blog. My closeness to this project must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours.

90DayJane was meant to mirror the tragic figure, Christine Chubbuck. Newscaster Christine Chubbuck committed suicide in 1974 by shooting herself in the head live on air. She was very vocal about her depression to those around her and gave every indication of her exact intentions leading up to the event. Sadly, no one reacted or helped Christine and those left behind could only ask “why”.

Her story both inspired and terrified me because I can truly empathize with her rage and even her isolation. I wondered how Christine’s life and subsequent suicide would play out in our time. Would the internet be yet another place of isolation to her or an escape? If she remained vocal about her intentions would anyone bother asking “why” or even noticing before the fact? Would the reaction (if any) of the public change her intentions?

I thought this mirror might reflect the isolation everyday people feel and the lack of true human connection on the internet.

It is my feeling that the internet is the best and worst example of human interaction. This was painfully proven to me by reading every comment and every email. I believe I owed that to everyone. I know we all saw the dark side of the reactions in the blog comments. There was so much hate, immaturity and apathy.

But, I truly wish everyone could see the beauty and honesty in the emails; many people feel like Jane (me). People have been more real and heartfelt than I thought was possible. I owe them a debt of gratitude for showing me the difference between people’s reactions and their true feelings. I understand.

I do want everyone to know that I accepted no money for 90DayJane despite multiple offers from television, film, books, etc… I will not release my identity and I ask not to be contacted for any type of promotion.

I want only for the people who wrote to me to know that I hear them and feel the same way. Your emails touched me so much. Please, share your thoughts with someone in your life or express them in a positive way.
To everyone, please reach out to those around you. It’s much harder to ask for help than to offer it.
90dayjane

Well we still don’t know for sure if it’s Julia Allison or not, but what do you think about this last post (that I never saw)?

She started a new blog after she shut down the first. You’ll find it here: http://90-day-jane.blogspot.com/ EDIT: This “New” Url 90-day-Jane.blogspot.com is now believed to actually be a spoof that contains a virus, possibly within the image of the ‘youtube’ video.

Update! We Know Who 90 Day Jane Is!

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~ by dissfunktional on February 13, 2008.