Obligatory Emily Gould Post

I’m a blogger, so I have to say something about Emily Gould’s ponderous New York Times Magazine essay. Although plenty have been outright critical of this LiveJournal esque, purely personal piece, I though it at least had potential.

After all, there has been a culture shift among people of Gould’s generation (of which I am a younger member) when it comes to comfort with sharing personal information with strangers. But instead of an essay that starts with Gould’s travails at Gawker and then gives us some sort of conclusion or speculation about the larger effect or root causes of oversharing, we get page-after-page describing her panic attacks, relationship with Josh Stein and mean commenters. We don’t really get any insight into the sociology (or pop sociology or anthropology) of being an oversharer. Instead, we get Gould’s redemption story (replace drink too much with overshare and you get James Frey without the lying!), with very little insight into why people share so much and why readers are so fascinated with lives of young bloggers.

On a slightly different note, isn’t it super obvious what the Times is doing? Just by having Emily Gould – blogosphere star! – write something, they’ve guaranteed themselves a ton of traffic and buzz. This isn’t the first time the Times has done this. Remember that weird, anecdotal “blogging kills” article? Sure, there wasn’t any news or even a real trend to report, but they sure got a ton of incoming links!