Blogging and the unhealthy addiction to transparency
The New York Times Magazine has published a fascinating and even heartbreaking first-person account by Emily Gould, a former blogger for Gawker. In it she dissects not only the parasitic nature of Gawker Media blogging but also the sometimes-dangerous tendencies of bloggers in general.
My blogging today is much different than when I first started back in 2003. Back then my writing was filled with raw anger and was deeply personal. And as is common with posting about personal experiences, it was nearly impossible for it not to involve those who were close to me. And I certainly didn’t create any kind of filter to protect anyone; some of those posts were written expressly for attacking others I knew in real life. I lost one good friend and one girlfriend at least partially because of that first blog. And reading it now (the archives are still online if you know the right search terms to find them), I can’t help but shudder at how ignorant and angry I was when blogging as a college freshman.
“It’s easy to compare the initial thrill of evoking an immediate response to a blog post to the rush of getting high, and the diminishing thrills to the process of becoming inured to a drug’s effects,” Gould writes in the Times piece. “The metaphor is so exact, in fact, that maybe it isn’t a metaphor at all.”
This is certainly true. One can see signs of this with the obsessive checking of traffic statistics, technorati ranking and adsense clicks. Writing a post and attracting dozens of links and thousands of readers does wonders for your self esteem for an hour or two before you’re inevitably pulled back down. That initial burst of traffic can quickly diminish in a matter of hours, and by the end of the day it’s like being left to clean up after a party. Three thousand people came in, made a mess, and left you to gather up the trash alone.
There is a related but totally opposite problem. When your blog garners no attention, you feel free to say absolutely anything.That makes it easy to let your guard down. I feel relatively sure that friends and acqaintances don’t check my blog more than once or twice a year. But what if they do? And what if something I said three years ago offended them to their core?
Common sense tells you not to mention the workplace or significant others on a blog.
I just regard my blogging as a collection of notes to myself: sometimes brief and cryptic, sometimes bitchy. (I should mention I write short stories, so blogging is just a secondary matter).
Female bloggers receive more attention from readers than males do and probably are focused on appeasing fans.
BTW, isn’t this type of article merely linkbait for the bloggers?