By Francisco Delatorre
Online Caroline is one of the more baffling web sites I've come across
in a long time. After interacting with it for approximately a week,
it wasn't until a few days ago that the site, and all things related
to it, began to make sense. Essentially, this is a web-based interactive
soap opera that unfolds under the auspices of a burgeoning online
friendship. You log in, watch her web cam, listen to phone messages,
and tour her house, among other things. In order to personalize the
experience, there is a questionnaire section where the more you interact
with her, the more intimate the relationship becomes, because when
she writes you she can draw parallels between people in her life and
in yours.
Her emails are quite certainly something of note. They are highly
personal confessionals, recounting or referring to things that happened
the previous day, and her life is, let me tell you, rife with things
worth talking about. A pregnant best friend she suspects of sleeping
with her cryptic boyfriend, another friend who makes an ass of himself
and her whenever he visits, a burglary, mysterious packages, and free-flowing
vodka. In her emails, she asks for advice, encourages interaction,
and entices you back to the site by symbolically opening up more of
her house or showing you more of her possessions to indicate a growing
friendship.
The site itself is set up in a very interesting manner. The sections
range from harmlessly voyeuristic (my webcam, my stuff, my boyfriend,
my house) to a little more creepily so (in the "take a message"
section we can hear selected phone messages of hers). The interaction
is anything from the "you decide" section, where you offer
advice at the press of a button, to the "send me things"
section, which makes use of a related web site to send virtual gifts
(I've sent her a Hitchcock film, a light read, a Moby CD, and two
bottles of vodka), to actually sending her emails (to which her boyfriend's
work account automatically replies to) or calling her (which yields
an answering machine).
This site is, in its execution, reminds me of the film The Game.
In it, the main character hires an agency to tailor make a game for
him, and the company, in their seemingly infinite resources, spins
a yarn that engulfs him in a supposed conspiracy to ruin him, and
leads to such antics as his being drugged and left for dead in Mexico,
shooting his brother, and jumping off a building. In the end, though,
it is nothing more than a well spun fantasy, albeit one that offers
him a new perspective. Hardly so far-reaching, Online Caroline still
has some of the same elements of immersion. For example she once decided
we should have a dinner for two and gave me choices as to what she
should make and what she should wear. After citing a preference for
steak and the stripey pants, the next time I visited the site there
she was, serving steak in the stripey pants.
Aside from the tremendous care they take to make the experience personal
and immersive, there is an interesting element that addresses the
current stigma toward online relationships of any sort (from friendships
to romance). During the steak dinner, her friend shows up, and presents
to the webcam notes hidden inside his jacket calling me a sad weirdo
with no life. Caroline returns, finds what he's doing and proceeds
to kick him out, then apologizes emphatically in the next email, claiming
that what we have is something "more" and that not all online
voyeurs are that weird. In many a letter she claims she wishes
we could know each other better or that I could be there because this
online thing is so odd.
In the end, it's nothing more than a soap opera, albeit a very convincing
one. There are actors playing the parts of Caroline, David, Sophie,
and Simon, and the experience is hardly written for one person. The
message boards devoted to Caroline are somewhat interesting. They
are separated into a few groups: the newcomers asking questions and
speaking their mind about how much they hate her friends, the social
group who just says hello or "I'm 20 and gorgeous, " and
the academic crowd studying Caroline and her watchers.
An interesting experiment in interactive storytelling that reaches
a scope not normally seen, it's groundbreaking and innovative. On
the other hand, her openness, as well as the tremendously odd nature
of many of the story elements, can be somewhat unsettling. I suspect
I'll continue visiting the site for a little while longer out of morbid
curiosity, though I'm reaching the end of my tether. Oh those weird
brits.