Some analysis (Exposed)

I was perusing through the New York Times website yesterday as I was sitting hopelessly bored at my desk waiting for the never-ending large-scale printouts to finally finish. Eventually with enough clicks on various links throughout the labyrinth of a site I came across this article which is set to be published in the Sunday Magazine. I have to say that I was intrigued, I’m always interested in things regarding social media — and Emily Gould is a well known blogger (considering her previous experience with Gawker), I was hoping to delve into a wealth of information, how to be disovered,  maybe get those answers as to why so many of us blog today, you know, those sorts of questions. Instead I found an overwhelming amount of crap — she’s an excellent writer that is for sure, a 10 page article on the NYT website is a fairly uncommon thing in itself, but to have it fairly well written and interesting well that’s an accomplishment right there.

I suppose I’m going to just dissect it in bits, some of her comments and actions bothered me, some other things made me wonder, others I simply had an opinion on.  I’m not really attacking her writing or her, I simply had a lot of thoughts while reading the article, and I feel that need to get them all down.

All excerpts from this article are in italics [ and blockquoted ].

“The anecdotes I posted on Emily Magazine occasionally featured Henry [...] Henry, seemingly alone among our generation, went out of his way to keep his online presence minimal.”

Damn, that guy is smart. If you even Google my name now you’re going to find a Vimeo account, my blog, as well as a couple of other websites I run. There’s also undoubtedly my address somewhere in there, a way to contact me, maybe even a phone number. There’s LinkedIn, Scribd, Twitter. Heck I even have a lot of my medical history linked to a Google Health account. If there were anyone who really felt like stealing my identity all they’d need is my Facebook account and I’d probably be done for.  Not to mention all of the original Google-fears that everyone has. My mother is incredibly afraid of Identity theft — having suffered it multiple times. I however freely give all of my information away to the tangled tubes of the internet, at least I’ll be able to say that I admitted that it could happen.

“Once, I made fun of Henry for referring to “Project Runway” as “Project Gayway.” He worried that “people” — the shadowy, semi-imaginary people who read my blog and didn’t know Henry well enough to know that he wasn’t a homophobe — would be offended. He insisted that I take down the offending post and watched as I sat at my desk in our bedroom, slowly, grudgingly making the keystrokes necessary to delete what I’d written.”

I think that she touches on this later on in the story. However I don’t understand how one can feel comfortable enough to mention their significant others in their own blogs. I mean, I myself divulge a fair amount of information. Maybe going so far as to mention incidents with friends, but my relationships I have always felt a need to keep private. It’s really my sort of thing, trying to protect it and keep it in a little bubble while I can. If there’s problems they’re internal and not meant to be shared with the world — and even if you need advice you should have it be personal — not have some sort of ridiculous expose and only display one side of the story… But that’s just my opinion.  He was right to be angry — and she should have known better especially considering that he preferred his minimal presence on the internet. Something like that must have felt terribly violating.

“I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt.”

This is something that I incredibly enjoy about the internet, and the entire concept surrounding a blog. I was always raised in a household where even though I was allowed to voice my opinion, Mom and Dad would still maintain that their point of view was “right” no matter what I said. They always raised me to say and do what I felt is right and to an extent I feel like I do — which I may not always do in the most productive manner — and sometimes I do pretty crazy things (dreadlocks)…but it’s always turned out alright in the end. I feel like my maintaining a blog really allows me to have an outlet. I’ve always enjoyed writing and to have that unconstrained ability to say and write whatever you want is incredibly freeing. We were always raised in this society where English Teachers decide your topic, or in History you have to answer your Document Based Questions, there was hardly ever that freedom to do exactly what you willed — to go crazy and to be creative and free. That is what I love about writing my own blog.

“It’s easy to draw parallels between what’s going on online and what’s going on in the rest of our media: the death of scripted TV, the endless parade of ordinary, heavily made-up faces that become vaguely familiar to us as they grin through their 15 minutes of reality-show fame. No wonder we’re ready to confess our innermost thoughts to everyone: we’re constantly being shown that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.”

I felt like this was a slightly limited observation — there’s been some death of scripted televsion, but it’s only dying when compared to the SONIC BOOM that is reality TV. There is this book that was released that I’ve been dying to read titled “Generation Me” and it’s talking about just how selfish our generation is, how self-centered and self-obsessed. Our generation has really lost touch with reality — I think that a lot of us feel like we can easily become famous, that we can Myspace Whore ourselves out enough til we can reach Tila Tequila status. Maybe we can even get our own reality TV shows! OH YEAH! This part of my generation really sickens me, when I see girls from my high school desperately auditioning for every MTV slot that comes along. Why would you want to do that?  Emily is right here that everyone is just dying for their chance to be on television — I’m sure that everyone wishes that they could be famous, I always sincerely wonder AT WHAT COST.

“Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade’s reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.”

I would never personally have done a lot of what Emily reveals that she did here. That’s just me. I’ve always been a relatively shy and introverted person, I never liked announcing my personal problems to the world, and a lot of her actions here are specifically vindictive and hurtful. I have such a guilt complex that I would probably never even be able to really deal with it. Heck I still feel terrible for picking on Stephen Potter in 11th grade Chemistry — simply because he was annoying me at the time. I always of course had my little sketch book where the pretty cheerleader girls who were never nice to me somehow found their way to a fiery death or a hangmans noose but I certainly never CIRCULATED it. I mean, the Bible beating “Christians” that I attended school with already thought I was a Wiccan, I wasn’t going to let them think I was a homicidal maniac as well.

“In the fall of 2006, I got a call from the managing editor of Gawker Media, a network of highly trafficked blogs, asking me to come by the office in SoHo to talk about a job. Since its birth four years earlier, the company’s flagship blog, Gawker, had purported to be in the business of reporting “Manhattan media gossip,” which it did, sometimes — catty little details about writers and editors and executives, mostly. But it was also a clearinghouse for any random tidbit of information about being young and ambitious in New York. Though Gawker was a must-read for many of the people working at the magazines and newspapers whose editorial decisions the site mocked and dissected, it held an irresistible appeal for desk-bound drones in all fields — tens of thousands of whom visited the site each day.”

My only comment about this was HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN? Especially considering that she only had one small blog at the time, a couple hundred readers — no big whoop. How do you get attention like that? That’s ridiculous. Then again I don’t know if I could do that simply because the high stress environment. 12 posts a day? Shit.

“I felt liberated — finally, a job where I could really be myself! Never again would I have to censor my office-inappropriate sentiments or shop the sale racks at Club Monaco for office-appropriate outfits.”

I know that feeling all too well (except I never shopped the sale racks at Club Monaco — super cool clothes but out of my price range fo’ sho’ [that was me too poor to afford r's]). Or at least the office job where I feel like I don’t fit in at all. Telling your boss that you’re more of a “choose your own adventure” book rather than a Mystery is sometimes a mistake, as is labelling your top drawer “Pirate Hats”.

“Another person I ended up I.M.-ing daily was one of Gawker’s most frequent targets, a blogger named Julia Allison, who, within a year, parlayed a magazine dating column into a six-figure TV talking-head job and then into a reality show, all while updating her blog several times a day. Julia wore skimpy, Halloween-style costumes to parties and dated high-profile men in high-profile ways — her tech-millionaire boyfriend collaborated with her on a blog where they took turns chronicling their relationship’s ups and downs. I was initially put off by Julia’s naked attention-whoring — “Attention is my drug,” she often confessed. In thousands of photos on her Flickr feed she posed, caked in makeup, like a celebrity on the red carpet, always thrusting out her breasts and favoring her good side. But in the midst of this artifice she was disarmingly straightforward about how badly she craved the attention that Internet exposure gave her — even though it came at the expense of constant, intensely vitriolic mockery.”

All that I can really say about this is that I really strongly dislike Julia Allison — maybe I was a little jealous of her because she dated the super cute, really nerdy, and very strange my kind of guy and creator of Vimeo Jakob Lodwick, however I really think it’s just because she’s a huge attention whore. Girls like that are still living in high-school, they need to be the prettiest, have the best clothes, and date the most high profile guy. She really just disgusts me. At least she “thrusts out her breasts”. Maybe if I stand up straight I’ll look prettier — or seem to have bigger boobs.

“I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity,” she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn’t “famous” in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous — I didn’t go to red-carpet parties or ride around in limos, and my parents’ friends still had no idea what I was talking about when I described my job — but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it.”

Okay, her comment is slightly true — she may not be featured in OK or People with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. She’s sort of famous within her own Microcosmic community. Just like Perez Hilton with celebrity blogging would be or Tim Buckley, (really dreamy) Ryan North, Randall Munroe or Jeph Jacques would be in the realm of webcomics. ROFLCon did a really good job of illustrating that with internet memes, and such. Emily Gould and Julia Allison are really only important within their own little world of New York and the Blogosphere that is covered by Gawker Media (okay, not so little world — but still — my mom doesn’t know who she is).