Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them

To Gawk or not to gawk... is that the question?

Emily Gould, erstwhile editor at Gawker, has a first person narrative in the New York Times magazine this Sunday, titled "Exposed," about her experience as a pseudo celebrity blogger. She's only in her mid-twenties, and had ratcheted up the mediascape from an entrepreneurial self-exposer to join the staff of Gawker, where she got caught up in the catty excitement and traded her personal integrity for comments and attention. The online article had over 800 responses, to which additions apparently at one point were blocked, as of this afternoon. Most of them bemoaned the Times, the customs, and her apparent lack of self-awareness or reflection. In spite of being burned for too much self-disclosure or disclosure about her loved ones, here she was again, using a format that many found too bloggy, soggy, and unworthy of the venue. Armchair psychoanalysts suggested she was a narcissist, a masochist, or in her twenties. Some snarked that naysayers were just out of the loop. Others were truly mean, and felt that she deserved it.

Photo by Elinor Carruci

At first blush, it was hard not to concur with the pitiless commenters, who were also accused of themselves contributing to this circle of shame. But when I watched her visit to Jimmy Kimmel on Larry King posted on YouTube, the vampish egotistical poseur of the Times article became more human. She was genuinely unprepared, naively stepping up to be knocked around by someone who, it was pointed out in the YouTube comments, is himself a mean-spirited jokester who dates the meanest girl in school. As she rolled her eyes and pursed her lips into a tremulous smile, I kept wondering if she was looking at herself on a monitor. It was as if all her energy was consumed with composing her face, and she had no time to compose her thoughts, as she was completely unable to respond effectively. She was up against Kimmel, Mark Geragos, and some other media guy, all of whom have spent thousands of hours in front of the camera. Her naivete was a complete contrast to the character she is playing on the Internet, a tattooed, smarter-than-thou, self-involved, self-promoter.

In the current Columbia Journalism Review cover story Lost Media, Found Media," author Alissa Quart writes ambivalently about the demise of traditional quality journalism and the rise of the fast food, disposable stuff being churned out by people like Emily Gould. Young people. It seems like in some ways we are not so much experiencing the impact of Future Shock from the Internet, but just the expected fin de siècle shock of the new, and the resistence of the old.

From Answers.Com:

fin de siècle [faⁿ dĕ si‐airkl]the French phrase (‘end of century’) often used to refer to the characteristic world‐weary mood of European culture in the 1880s and 1890s, when writers and artists like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the French symbolists, under the slogan ‘ art for art's sake’, adopted a ‘decadent’ rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society.

In a broader sense the expression fin de siècle is used to characterise anything that has an ominous mixture of opulence and/or decadence, combined with a shared prospect of unavoidable radical change or some approaching "end."

Note that it is not necessarily change itself that is implied in the expression fin de siècle, but rather its anticipation. For example, for the 19th-century fin de siècle, the most radical changes to the cultural and social order occurred more than a decade after the new century had started (most notably as a result of World War I).

The behaviors and attitudes of the young people who came of age on the Internet are just beginning to take over the mainstream, close to a decade after the new century started. They are not too different from their forebears, rejecting moral or ethical foundations for their work. Posting endless details about their lives on the web is normal for them. Even posting incomplete epiphanies that they finally have it figured out.