The short life of Kaycee Nicole | Media

The short life of Kaycee Nicole

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Kaycee Nicole was a teenage girl from midwestern America. She was an intelligent, optimistic high-school student just like any other. She enjoyed music, poetry and school. But Kaycee was dying of cancer.

Kaycee was an active internet user. She made friends via email, instant messaging and even by telephone. A friend helped her to set up an online diary or "weblog", and over a two-year period, millions of internet users visited it to read about her courageous struggle with leukaemia. She laid bare her feelings and fears for the world to see - and her honesty won her many admirers.

The daily updates on Kaycee's battle with cancer became a regular part of many people's lives. When she went into remission, readers were overjoyed. When the disease returned, people sent her presents and cards to express their regret. Kaycee's mother Debbie even started her own site to help discuss the difficulties of caring for a child with leukaemia.

Then, on 16 May this year, it was announced that Kaycee had died. It was not as a direct result of her cancer, but of an unexpected aneurysm. Condolences came flooding in. Thousands of personal websites across the world posted messages of sadness. The internet mourned.

Well-wishers contacted the family, hoping to send cards and flowers to show their grief. But Debbie, who had seen how much support Kaycee had received from her internet friends, flatly refused - even though she had never stopped gifts before.

Cynical web-users at discussion forum metafilter.com decided to investigate Kaycee's story. There was no record of anyone matching her name ever living in Kansas. Local schools knew nothing of her. Photos purporting to be Kaycee were in fact of someone else - an innocent college basketball star who was still very much alive. Each item of evidence pieced together a complicated jigsaw.

Kaycee Nicole hadn't died. She never existed.

The whole operation was the work of a Kansas housewife, Debbie Swenson. Posing as both Kaycee and her mother, Swenson had started by constructing an online personality, but it spiralled into an increasingly complex deception as the diary became ever more popular. Once her cover was blown, she revealed the truth quickly with one final diary entry.

"Her name was not Kaycee and she was not my daughter," Debbie wrote. The diary, she says "was about the lives of three people who suffered with cancer. I am to blame for wanting to tell their stories. I am to blame for weaving the lives of all three together."

When the hoax was discovered, internet users were shocked, bemused and ashamed. Had they really been fooled so easily? Why - and how - did Debbie lie for two years?

Tom Coates, who owns one of the UK's most popular weblogs, plasticbag.org, believes personal writing on the web gives an immediacy of contact you can't get anywhere else. "You can respond immediately to people's stories - even become friends with them. It's one of the things that makes the web such an incredible place."

The Kaycee saga, however, showed another side to web writing. "When people read personal writing on the web, they just seem to assume that it's true," Coates, 28, continues. "All their critical faculties go out the window."

One of those most drawn into the Kaycee hoax was Randall van der Woning, a Canadian living in Hong Kong. Van der Woning was touched by Kaycee's story when he stumbled across her one day in an internet chat room. It was he who decided to help her set up the website to bring the story to a wider audience - voluntarily giving up his time and money.

Randall grew to respect Kaycee's dignity under distressing circumstances. He even spoke to her on the phone. Or rather he thought he was speaking to her. "I sincerely believed there were two people I spoke with on the telephone," he reveals sheepishly. "If it was only one, then someone is one hell of an actress. All I know for certain is that I opened my heart, and I gave of my time, money, energy, and emotional resources to help someone else," he continues. "And in the end, I was burned for it."

Whatever Debbie Swenson's reasons may be - and she refused to comment further - it is certain that her level of dedication to the Kaycee affair made it one of the most meticulous hoaxes the web has ever seen.

Of course, the Kaycee saga wasn't the first time people have been fooled by the internet, and it won't be the last. Two years ago, Californian telecommunications worker Gary Dale Hoke created a fake website announcing a buyout of PairGain Technologies, the company he worked for. Thousands of shares were bought, pushing the price higher and higher - until PairGain refuted the claims and the fraud was discovered. Hoke, 25 - who did not directly profit from the scam - was placed on parole and ordered to pay back more than £70,000 to investors who were drawn into the lie.

There's also the case of Sheyla Morrison - like Kaycee, popular on chat, game and discussion sites - who apparently committed suicide. When the story was finally unravelled, the personality of Sheyla turned out to be the work of a web-obsessed couple. The pair had split acrimoniously, and the suicide story was part of a bizarre attempt to win a custody battle.

From the highly publicised cases of paedophiles using the internet to stories such as Kaycee's, people seem to fall for lies developed on the web. The chances are that when you check your email, you'll have an unwanted message. Most of us delete them without a second thought; those scams promising you can make millions in minutes, chain letters about children in Africa who need money to pay for vital operations.

The judgment exercised in email doesn't necessarily carry through to the internet itself. Kaycee's story is just one example of that. But what is it that makes people more likely to be drawn into web deceptions than into those from other media sources?

Dr Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, believes it is an endemic problem with online communication. "Given the mutability of identity, how are we to negotiate social relations that, at least in the realm of face-to-face communication, were fixed by recognition of identity?" The internet breaks down the physical barriers that help to prevent the spread of lies.

"People expect communication to be unmediated on the internet," points out Coates of plasticbag.org. "That's something they don't expect of any other medium. In print, people look at information, ask 'Where is the story?', put it onto the page and excise the rest."

Kaycee's diary was direct and honest. Her appeal, perhaps, was that she was staring an all-too-human problem directly in the face. Technological advances have taken the edge off insurmountable problems. "The average human being of today is not impressed by miracles," says Jones. So when Kaycee defeated her disease - a miracle presented through technology - thousands of users were sucked into the story.

In the real world, we all wear different masks for different social situations. These conventions carry over to the web like any other form of behaviour. Most internet users have yet to discover the boundaries between personal space and public broadcast - and until they do, hoaxes such as Kaycee will keep on happening.

· Read more about the Kaycee hoax at http:// groups.yahoo.com/group/kaycee-nicole

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