Plain Layne and the Authentication Imperative

Jason Kottke has some thorough coverage of the Plain Layne hoax, which has also been reported in City Pages. There was a discussion about taking bloggers at face value over at Lauren's some time ago too. The basic rundown: Odin Soli, a 35-year-old man living in Woodbury, Minnesota, kept a blog as Plain Layne, a young woman with a tumultuous life. From the City Pages article:

Despite the moniker, Layne was anything but plain. Within the past few months, she recounted a rape that she suggested led her to lesbianism, became engaged to a formerly straight woman, suffered a dramatic breakup with said woman (partially because her fiancée resented being dissected on Layne's site), hooked up and noisily quarreled with a girl from her work cafeteria, met her birth parents for the first time, got involved with a risky internet startup, and had a ton of hot sex (which, because of her linguistic flourishes, was often hottest when solo). All that while keeping up a high-volume website of 5,000 unique visitors per day and middle-managing an IT group for "Minicorp," a large pseudonymous company that from her descriptions sounded like 3M or Cargill or Honeywell. In short: Anaïs Nin, I'd like you to meet William Gibson.

In addition, Layne had profiles on Orkut and Friendster. I'm following the discussions of Layne because I'm still thinking about how to defend the kind of research I want to do against those who look askance at internet research--against what I call the authentication imperative. Arguments have been made that there's a degree of fiction in every representation of self online; you're always only presenting a part of yourself. I'm not sure how persuasive they are for a lot of people, though. Does Turkle discuss this issue in Life on the Screen? What other internet researchers have written about the authentication imperative?

Update: More at Netwoman and at Trish's place.