Ann Hirsch: Twelve

In 1998 Ann Hirsch was twelve years old, and she frequented an AOL chat room called Twelve. As she got to know the regulars, she got to know the way they chatted, the words they used, the usernames they picked, the kinds of relationships they made. The remote community of the chat room lived by its own set of rules, like any social group, and policing was loose, limited to the snitcher’s arbitrary application of AOL’s Terms of Service. Under these conditions Ann developed a long-distance romance with a frequent user of Twelve who was more than twice her age. "My point with telling this story is just to be honest and convey both the benefits I got from this relationship (intimacy, sexual knowledge) but also show the manipulation and exploitation that was involved in a relationship like this as well." Twelve was originally released as an interactive e-book in 2013 on iTunes but after receiving some press for the work, iTunes banned the book. Now, Ann Hirsch has worked with Molly Soda to