25 May 2008

You go Gould


In the magazine section of today's New York Times there was a story by notorious (my word) blogger Emily Gould  By her own admission Ms. Gould was guilty of "oversharing." That is, revealing the too intimate and too much of it. It's an interesting tale in many ways peculiar to our times. Some of the online comments about the story called Gould "self indulgent" “sophomoric" "self obsessed" "pathetic." What I found curious was the repetition of the comment, "no one cares" presented in various forms. (Yes, there were also people like me who said nice things). If in fact a person doesn't care why comment at all. Indeed, why did so many feel the need to say that they and no one else "care."
Weird.
I suppose some of it is a natural reaction to a person writing about themselves (imagine!). It's also jealousy. The woman is clearly bright, very pretty, talented and had the feature article in the Sunday Times magazine.
I'm curious about the venting that goes on so publicly. People ranting about politicians, local sports teams, journalists, anything and everything.
To a certain degree its great. Evidence of a vibrant democracy and people sharing their thoughts. But there's so much vitriol in it. The under lying anger is a tad scary. Why are we all so pissed off and why do we take it out on each other?
Anyway, I'd like to give props to Emily Gould. She wrote an interesting story about personal experiences that has relevance in the still quite new world of the blogosphere. Like the rest of life -- only more so -- we're just figuring out this blog stuff as we go along. Her story helps.

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