NEWS: Hoax or Fiction?

From BoingBoing: The above video is a slide show of a twitter account, documenting the last few months of a young woman diagnosed with cancer. The video has been viewed almost a million times on YouTube, and the account itself attracted thousands of followers. The account has been the cause of some consternation recently after Jennifer Mendlesohn of Medium.com set out to find the story of the person involved, but found nothing - a digital ghost.

The report suggests the whole exercise to be a hoax, and that people who have shed a tear at the touching tale have been deceived in some way. Comparisons are made to James Frey's hoax misery memoir A Million Little Pieces, but is running a faux-twitter account of a dying woman really such a bad thing? It invites people to read, interact and invest in a subject they might not have otherwise encountered. It allows them to follow a story on a different platform, and emotionally invest in a character they previously knew nothing about.

In short - it's fiction. And fiction in every other form is lauded - TV, film, books, radio. So putting a story into a series of 140 character missives, told over years, developed to the point of staggering verisimilitude is a major achievement. Maybe it was created as an exercise in storytelling, or perhaps it was created as an avatar, a second life for the creator to exist in digital form (heck, the Internet was born from that, with anonymous enthusiasts playing D&D over the phone lines).

So is the twitter account a hoax or a fiction? I vote the latter, unless you're telling me that novels can be called some form of hoax. Was I deceived when I shed a tear at the end of, for instance Goodbye Mr Chips, the story of a FICTIONAL school teacher? 

What's your view? Leave a comment.