August 18th, 2008
When Does Sharing Become Oversharing?
Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!
A few weeks back, former Gawker editor Emily Gould revealed the story of her rise and fall from blogging micro-fame in a 8000 word New York Times Magazine cover story –
One of the strangest and most enthralling aspects of personal blogs is just how intensely personal they can be. I’m talking “specific details about someone’s S.T.D.’s” personal, “my infertility treatments” personal. There are nongynecological overshares, too: “My dog has cancer” overshares, “my abusive relationship” overshares.
It’s easy to draw parallels between what’s going on online and what’s going on in the rest of our media: the death of scripted TV, the endless parade of ordinary, heavily made-up faces that become vaguely familiar to us as they grin through their 15 minutes of reality-show fame. No wonder we’re ready to confess our innermost thoughts to everyone: we’re constantly being shown that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.
Knowing that the worst of my online oversharing is still publicly accessible doesn’t thrill me, but it doesn’t scare me anymore either. I might hate my former self, but I don’t want to destroy her, and in a way, I want to respect her decision to show the world her vulnerability. I’m willing to let that blog exist now as a sort of memorial to a time in my life when I thought my discoveries about myself and what I loved were special enough to merit sharing with the world immediately.
I understand that by writing here about how I revealed my intimate life online, I’ve now revealed even more about what happened during the period when I was most exposed. Well, I’m an oversharer — it’s not like I’m entirely reformed.
The article reminded me of the San Fransisco Magazine “So Open It Hurts” story on the very public breakup between Chris Messina and Tara Hunt.
As Fred Wilson and Mathew Ingram pointed out, almost too many of us live very public lives now, between Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed and our blogs. Once the location-aware mobile social networks become mainstream, many of us will willingly share even our location details in public. Even those of us who otherwise think of ourselves as introverts.
For those of us who lifestream our lives on the internet, there are no easy answers to questions like “how open is too open?” and “when does sharing become oversharing?”
I can see that it’s easy to criticize Emily, especially given her Gawker background, but it’s useful to remember that all of us are learning to answer these questions, and the only way to learn is by trial and error.
Also See: Emily’s Larry King Live interview, Emily’s ex-boyfriend Josh Stein at New York Post, Emily’s semi-anonymous ‘Heartbreak Soup’ blog, Emily’s interview at NPR, Nick Denton at Gawker, David Smith at Guardian, Rachel Sklar at Huffington Post, Vanessa Grigoriadis’s New York Magazine feature on Gawker, Aparna Kumar at Wired on former internet millionaire Josh Harris’s 2001 ‘We Live In Public’ experiment.
