Paddlesworth is an entirely fictional online village, created by Homerton alumni Stephen Eisenhammer and David Story, and their team of comedians, artists and visionaries. At least, that’s what the national press would have you believe. Paddlesworthians, however, take a somewhat different view…

Paddlesworthpress.co.uk is an online newspaper, billed as the ‘world's first mixed-media, collaborative novel’, with different characters represented by different actors. But talk to ‘residents’ and they’ll tell you that their community is far from fictitious. Mary Burgess, co-editor of the publication, branded as a ‘defamatory report’ a recent article in The Guardian’s G2 supplement which described events in Paddlesworth as ‘works of fiction’.  Rumours about the village’s dubious existence are, according to her, no more than a ‘web of lies’, and the world ignores at its peril the newspaper’s recent revelation that the end of the world is just ten weeks away – a story which has dominated the newspaper, influencing everything from Agony Aunt columns to the hilariously morbid cartoon strip Paddy Mortsworth, and which, according to a website poll, 81% of villagers believe is credible.

In some ways, Paddlesworth does indeed seem very close to reality. Its name and location are that of a real village, a few miles outside Folkestone in Kent. And some of its characters bear uncanny similarities to figures from real life. Alfred J. Fowler, for instance, the scientist behind the Paddlesworth Press’s apocalyptic exclusive, shares his name with a real-life 20th-century cosmologist. And, like many genuine village communities, Paddlesworth is characterised by an antipathy to the city and a distinct sense of the surreal. In short, it is a place where ‘budding musicians, practising lesbians and straight-laced conservatives live side by side peppered with the odd madman’.

The website’s interweaving of reality and fiction is so great that it is difficult to secure an interview with the project’s architects. Contact details are on the website for the use of visitors, but they will connect you only to the Press’s fictional personnel. The project is not confined to the website: characters can be followed and communicated with on Facebook and Twitter. I spoke to culture correspondent Douglas Slightly on ‘The Face Book’ (as he called it), though he couldn’t spare much time as he had ‘an apple crumble in the oven’. Rationalising the national press’s claims that Paddlesworth is a fantasy, Doug told me ‘it is so hard to accept one's world is ending, so one must fictionalise anything that threatens it’. Later, however, he changed his mind: ‘I wouldn't be surprised if this whole end-of-the-world thing were some hocus-pocus conjured up by the city just to extend their tyranny over the poor naked wretches that people the countryside’. He ended on a note of warning: ‘I'm onto them. I'm onto them and it won't last much longer’.

The Paddlesworth Press often has satirical motives. Its columnists and reporters caricature their real-life counterparts in their exploitation of rhetoric, corrupted statistics and zealous localism – ‘people in the countryside are on average at the very least 28% HAPPIER than city dwellers’ – and demonstrate one or two uncomfortable truths about rural life: ‘Village gossip is the enemy of infidelity’.

However, the power of the project is manifest in my own ethical response to my chat with Doug. ‘I trust and pray that you're somewhat different. Let's hope you can put Paddlesworth back on the map!’ Doug implored me. By reporting on Paddlesworth as a fiction, I feel as if I am betraying Doug and his townspeople. In this way, the project makes a serious point. The internet is a dimension in which the stability of identity is shaken. Aside from touching on much-rehearsed arguments concerning the safety of social networking sites, this also poses questions about the relationship between narratives and the objects they correspond to, and whether these objects have to exist in the physical world for them to be considered real. As co-founder David Story has said, ‘the internet has often been perceived to be tied to reality. There is a certain amount of trust in the online space… this project is exploring how that trust is misguided’.

The stories published in the Paddlesworth Press verge on the fantastical; its correspondents are eccentric; the whole idea exaggerates the weirdness often simmering beneath the surface of rural communities and society in general. But we can be no less sure of the truth-value of its reportage than we can of that of many other online communities, Facebook being a case in point. In cyberspace, reality is an ill-defined realm.

The Paddlesworth Press is funny, eccentric and penetrating. If you want to pay a visit, however, you had better do it soon, because the clock is counting down, and – who knows? – zero hour may prove critical for us all.