Blogging, Part II

A story appeared this weekend in the NY Times Magazine, and it's all about blogging. Well, one person's blogging. Her name is Emily Gould. You can read it in its entirety here. Warning: It's very long.

In the piece, a young former professional blogger rambles on about blogging, exposing her life on a blog, why she did it and why she doesn't do it so much anymore.

In essence, it's about waking up with ideas or stories you yearn to share and having the opportunity to do so. Only it can go too far.

I started this blog to kind of offset what I saw as a dearth of good news reporting but it has become more like an online diary with some newsy stuff thrown in.

She is a lot younger than I, so I think she kind of went overboard - although I saw a lot of me in her. I, too, wrote parodies of teachers and classmates in a notebook and passed it around during study hall. I, too, have the impulse to mock people for the world to see.

Emily says, Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade’s reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.

But I sort of keep it in check. As she says, she became a professional blogger and it came back on her - and it wasn't pretty.

Aside from the people who blog to keep friends and family apprised of their activities, I think we bloggers are all most akin to professional comedians. Who else is so willing to expose themselves and their inner circle to such derision?