Things I've Said About Emily Gould

I guess I’m a sucker for good writers, because I was able to read Emily Gould’s life story about blogging her personal feelings to strangers, writing for celebrity gossip editorials, and about her overall addiction to Internet Attention and consistently feel sympathy for her experiences without ever remembering that I inherently hate everything she does.

She makes it sound so harmless to scrutinize celebrity behavior and so rewarding to open herself up to an anonymous public, or as she described, to achieve “recognition via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.” It’s a type of behavior I’ve scoffed at, and at the same time derived a dark entertainment out of.

It’s one of my vices that I’ve taken so much joy from the Facebook notes written by my peers that have attempted recognition through confessing deep feelings when in turn they’ve come out as narcissistic and unintentionally funny.

The examples beg the question of where to draw the line on how public we should make ourselves in the advent of the Internet boom. For me, these people on Facebook cross the line when they attempt to celebrate their emotions and tag everyone on their friends list to attain as much attention as possible. Gould as well revolved her story around how her “oversharing” of information had become self-destructive.

But Gould also makes an important point about how the Internet is redefining where the barriers of privacy are being held, and part of it is a good thing. I enjoy publicizing the quasi-personal information about myself on the Internet, including a profile of my tastes and photo albums of my activities. It provides an opportunity to know me on a surface level when privacy would have built a wall preventing it. But Gould at her worst and the aforementioned Facebook bloggers craved a need to inform us far deeper than we would want (or should want) to know.

So I guess the question of sharing yourself on the Internet is making yourself available versus exploiting yourself. It wouldn’t hurt to maybe let the world know of a personal tidbit or two about yourself, but going too far places your situation in the attention mongering territory that I both hate and laugh at.