I don’t like this air, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop breathing it.
Emily Gould‘s first person account about her experiences as an emotional and personal open-air blogger is probably the most talked about cultural story in New York this weekend (and perhaps the rest of the country doesn’t rightly give a rat’s ass). The Sunday New York Times magazine cover story should serve as a cautionary tale for those with the narcissistic need and unfortunate habit of airing their dirty laundry over the Internet, but one can safely assume the article will do little to change this self-absorbed compulsion.
Having lived through the pain of oversharing – the lengthy, 10,000-word expose, documents the painful travails of “attention-whoring” and the backfiring of broadcasting TooMuchInformation about ones personal life online – it’s hard to imagine what Gould hopes to achieve by this further naked move. A book deal? A spot on Oprah? Her own show?
The self-regarding and vainglorious account about how being self-regarding and vainglorious nearly ruined her life has already incurred the wrath of the online community.
The comments section on the NYTimes article online (1,216 total) have been closed and reactions around the web are generally fiercely damning. Many are asking how the naive, self-important article itself could have made its way into the pages of the New York Times. Moreover, many are calling the article – filled with precious, navel-gazing photos of Gould asleep by her right-arm (her laptop) – a gigantic “waste of space,” tedious and pointless. Either way, everyone is talking about the story and Gould and the Gray Lady were surely self-aware enough to know the piece would cause a stir.
Why are we writing about this? We feel as a blogger, it’s sort of our constitutional duty to do so and because it’s puzzling, bizarre, and fascinating all at once in a I-can’t-stop starting-at-the-trainwreck kind of way. Plus we frown upon this kind of behavior. We wonder if Gould will ever learn? We’d cast a stone, but at this point we’d be mostly aiming at a badly beaten and listless body. Then again, you know, something positive (for her) and monetary will surely come out of this. In fact, count on it.
