Cherries On Top

 

I’m not sure if many people in the UK (bloggers excepted) have heard of Emily Gould, but she used to be an editor at gawker.com: a New York-based blog that skewers that city’s quasi-famous luminaries with lashings of delicious snark. She has attracted lashings and lashings of snark for herself, ever since another of her blogs, Heartbreak Soup, in which she detailed her private life and relationships, went into mass circulation. An ill-advised fling with a fellow Gawker editor called Josh Stein went down the pan, and he wrote about it - none too nicely - in Page Six magazine. The title: The Dangers of Blogger Love - What happens when you fall for someone who airs every detail of her life on the internet?

In a nutshell, Emily Gould and Josh Stein are the New York equivalent of our very own, little-loved Liz Jones and Nirpal Dhaliwal. 

And now…

Emily has the cover of The New York Times Magazine, with her own 8,000 word feature about the perils of broadcasting the details of one’s life to all and sundry on the worldwide web.  

I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.

“I’m taking it down,” Ruth called to me from the living room, where my laptop sat on a table, displaying our no-longer-so-secret blog.

I opened my eyes. “Don’t delete it,” I managed to say. “Just make it all password-protected.”

I lay there for a while longer. Eventually I read the article, which was, as personal betrayals go, far worse than I’d thought it could be. But the real power of the article, as Josh must have known when he wrote it, lay in the way that it exposed me to the new Gawker regime, which had already proved itself to be even more vicious than we’d ever been. If the article had been published when I was still working at Gawker, I would have been able to steer the conversation that it provoked. But now I was no longer simultaneously sniper and target - I was just a target, and I felt powerless.

Predictably, the article has already attracted its fair share of criticism, with commenters (including her old boss at Gawker) concluding that it serves only to prolong the narcissistic agonies. 

But what gets me is the overwhelming temptation to disclose such personal details to the world in the first place. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll write about anything and everything, punching the I on my keyboard with happy abandon. But I’d shrivel up with embarrassment if I knew that certain family members, co-workers, random acquaintances and any stray cyber stalkers had a direct line into my day-to-day life, loves, prejudices, foibles and spasmodic idiocy. I certainly wouldn’t e-mail a childhood classmate, as Emily Gould reportedly did, stating, I started a blog about my sexual exploits. You should read it.

Indeed, the very thought has me shivering, stiffening my upper lip and reaching for a cucumber sandwich…

Exposed, The New York Times Magazine.

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