Oversharing

~ Laura

Emily Gould, the former writer of Gawker, writes about her online experience:

But is that really what’s making people blog? After all, online, you’re not even competing for 10 grand and a Kia. I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there’s a place where a record of their existence is kept — a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you. Sometimes that house is messy, sometimes horrifyingly so. In real life, we wouldn’t invite any passing stranger into these situations, but the remove of the Internet makes it seem O.K.

Gould writes about getting pummelled by Kimmel over the Gawker Stawker section of Gawker. I actually show this clip in my Media class. Students love it.

All the dirt here. Wow. I’m very tempted to nuke this blog.

UPDATE: The NYT had to shut down comments on this article. 727 people wrote in to question why this article was worthy of the magazine cover.

Published by Laura

8 thoughts on “Oversharing”

  1. On one hand, come on, Jimmy. Do you think Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were careful, fact-checking, truth-respecting gossip columnists? In some ways, Gawker’s no different from older forms of celebrity-culture reportage.
    On the other hand, Emily Gould establishes a new gold standard for shallowness and insincerity in that clip.

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  3. On the other hand, Emily Gould establishes a new gold standard for shallowness and insincerity in that clip.
    Yeah, the intonation/coy hamminess act is just about killing me.

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  4. I refuse to watch the clip. But when I read the article, I went back and checked my own blog, and it is password projected. And read by approximately 2.3 people.

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  5. Hedda Hopper. Who now speaks of her? Historians! and by the way, she was at a party once, and talked with someone who said he did his xmas cards in July, and she said, “July?! How do you know who your friends will be at Christmas time?”

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  6. I can’t watch the clip either. (I can’t watch Bloggingheads or vlogs either, but I can watch tv shows. Go figure.)
    But I have come to the conclusion from reading the article is that Emily Gould is a moron. OK, maybe she’s just young. But I was 26 when I discovered the interwebs, and I wised up pretty quickly. Maybe if I had been 24 it would have been different.
    My online presence is somewhat anonymous (I avoid putting my name on anything) but actually easily findable by Google nerds and opposition researchers, which is why I’ll never be president. I’ve definitely said things I should regret, some of them to television writers. Ah, good times, good times.

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  8. I read the Times article. It struck me that she is really just a lot more narcissistic than most people, but not qualitatively different, and that she can, actualy, write, reasonably well. Someone one is glad one doesn’t know, but that’s all (and there are plenty of those). Why wouldn’t that magazine devote a cover story to her — at least half its cover stories are equally inconsequential. Its not like its… well, dare I say it, The Economist, or anything.

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