The drama of lonelygirl15, a beautiful teenage video diarist type on YouTube, is only the most recent soap opera to hit the net. Debate rages as to whether our heroine Bree's confessions, which include boyfriend trouble, parent angst, and an intriguing whiff of old-time Satanism, are a commercial venture, the art project of an inspired theatre group, or, God forbid, the work of a real, beautiful, teenage video diarist. So far, so last week. Yet this current microfad plunges me much further back, way back into my internet time machine. In 1995, and yes folks, that's eleven of your offline years, American film maker Scott Zakarin launched a net soap opera called The Spot, featuring a bunch of beautiful teenage online diary types, winning himself a Wikipedia citation as the 'first episodic fiction Web site,' but entirely missing the forces that lonelygirl15 has so neatly mastered. It's time to get real fake.

There's a three-dimensional quality to the lonelygirl15 saga: there's the story itself, as narrated by Bree and her sometime friend Daniel, then there's other YouTube community members posting comments about whether the whole thing is a fake, and then there's external bloggers blogging about bloggers who've blogged about each other's blogs on the subject. Much of this debate is concerned with two powerful forces around which virtual culture constantly circulates: authenticity and intimacy. If you wade through the thousands of comments (and much spam) appended to Bree's video diaries, many writers appear to feel they're in direct connection with her. Others angrily accuse her of abusing the YouTube community by presenting fake material as real.

This is the essence of the virtual experience: that it feels so real, that all these virtual creatures are so close to our screens that we can touch them, look in their eyes, read their diaries, get to know their laugh – yet they may in fact may be entirely, cynically false. You'll see endless arpeggios and variations played on this tension, more or less seriously, in every aspect of online culture, as more and more of our experience becomes virtual.

Back in 1995 many, many journalists were quick to point out that the soap opera surrounding The Spot's financial problems, corporate governance, and management conflicts proved much more entertaining than the occupants of the Santa Monica beach house which gave the website its name. The site eventually closed in 1997, when, according to the site's executive producer and head writer quoted in a News.com story, "a series of behind-the-scenes financial problems finally took their toll."

The Spot ultimately failed because it could never exploit the tensions between the real and the false. It was clearly made up, presented as honest fiction, and what real-world drama existed, in the shape of the business problems of its founders, was only of interest to the business press. Lonelygirl15 understands that popular modern drama sits in the treacherous space between the real and the fake. TV has taken on much the same lesson with its pursuit of the real fake, in the form of virtual reality shows. The point is to have your cake and eat it, too: we want a seamless web of meaning that has the crunchy veracity of real life and the staged, heightened drama of art: so the Big Brother contestants may get arrested, married, divorced, giving the real fake tabloids their fuel and keeping the whole saga spinning years after the programmes that made them famous have gone off air.

All we need to give this micromeme a fitting conclusion is to prove that the three words within lonelygirl15's name are all lies. She's clearly not lonely, as more than 6,000 people have posted to her pages on YouTube. She's clearly not fifteen, as says in one of her first videos that she's actually sixteen. You heard it here first: Lonelygirl15 is actually a boy. And I think Daniel knows.

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming

Times recommends

• From joystick to helmet: it's all in the mind
• 'Maniacal' engineer takes city computers hostage
• 3G iPhone review: fast but power-hungry