She definitely knows what she's doing. You can't go from that "Jolene" video you linked to sitting naked on a wrecking ball[0] in one year, by accident. The interesting thing is that she would choose deliberately to do that.

[0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My2FRPA3Gf8 - note that this song has 20x more views

Yes, I think she needed to kill the Hanna Montana image.

And look! here we are, talking in "social media" about her... damn!