Oversharing

Newbie bloggers (my self included), be careful! Blogging can ruin your life. Just ask Emily Gould. The former editor of Gawker, the NY gossip blog that doles out insults and snark with the staccato fire of an AK 47, is trying to start over after years of blogging seduced, absorbed and destroyed her.

Emily's story is on the cover of the upcoming NY Times Magazine. And it's a sad one people. In it she explains how she parlayed a life-long "knack for funny meanness" into a flashy career at the world's kewlist, nastiest, hippest blog. But she became addicted to "oversharing," or revealing more and more personal details of her life, and the quasi-fame that came from the exposure. She admits:

"The commenters’ compliments were reassuring. And though I was reluctant to admit it, there was even something sort of thrilling about being insulted by strangers. This was brand-new, having so many strangers pay attention to me, and at that point, every kind of attention still felt good. Occasionally, a particularly well-aimed barb would catch me off-guard, and I’d spend a moment worrying that I really was the worst writer ever to work for the site, or unfunny, or ugly, or stupid. But mostly, in the beginning, I was able to believe the compliments and dismiss the insults, even though they were both coming from the same place and sometimes the same people."

The most disturbing part was how her relationships were affected. Two of Emily's partners were uncomfortable with her revealing details about their lives to the world.

"As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn’t generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings, was a fundamental part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself to being part of the world I described."

The article now has an astounding number of comments: 430 and counting! Most are harsh criticisms of the snarky nature of her posts that revel in her getting What She Deserves. There was however, a poster whose comments asked some questions that really highlight how the participatory web is changing us:

Stories like this frighten me. Will this sort of behavior - "oversharing" - become accepted in the next twenty years, as our generation ages into power? Or maybe it's people like Henry, aware of the possibilities of the internet, who will be tomorrow's politicians, because the "dirt" on them has been kept out of the public eye. It seems almost like being trapped between a rock and a hard place: either one shares too much, but accepts that it's public information, or shares little and it's assumed there is something to hide. To the author, I ask: what do you see as the long-term consequences of this kind of behavior, if you've ever thought of them at all?
— A.I., Ann Arbor, MI

Just something for new bloggers to think about before they hand the world the keys to their diaries.