Oversharing and Attention-Blogging Part 1
I read a series of very interesting blog posts today, a rabbit trail of writing that dove into the subject of the (apparent) psychological dysfunction of some bloggers, the decent new media balance of others.
I started with a post by Brad Feld called “I Blog, I Tweet, But Why“. Being new to Brad’s blog, I looked around the header and sidebar for interesting tidbits before I started reading. What caught my eye is his Feedburner box in the upper right corner. At first I thought it said 1205 readers. Wow, that’s quite a few. Wait a minute…that isn’t a five, it’s a “k”. What the…one hundred twenty thousand readers? Is that right?!? But I digress.
In this post Brad talks about living a public life, a life of blogging and tweeting. It’s a short read and does not go too deep, but he brings up some interesting points. I like what he says about his oversharing, his mis-tweets. He says,
The notion of living in public is an unintended side effect of this.
It’s part of the package if you really want to engage with this stuff.
I’ve had my share of bad moments; like Fred the worst is when I piss
off my wife Amy
with something I write. It doesn’t happen often, but every now and
then I get an email saying approximating “please delete that tweet”.
I haven’t had that experience too much, although I can relate to what he is talking about. Sometimes those of us that live in the virtual world do share too much about our actual worlds, and it causes more than a little friction. At the beginning of his post, Brad mentioned Fred Wilson and one of his posts, so I clicked on that to see what inspired his words for today.
I recently started following Fred Wilson on Twitter, at the urging of my friend Jared. I haven’t been reading his blog though, so this was a first for me. His post from May 25 is called “Can We Live In Public?” In it Fred goes more in depth than Brad did, looking into a life under the lens of public observation via social networks and the new media. He mentions Emily Gould early on, we’ll get to her in a moment.
Fred talks about mean things being said in the comments from people he doesn’t know. I’ve experienced this many times. To my initial surprise (although I am no longer surprised by this, I have learned), I have even received mean comments from people I do know! Fred responds by saying this:
But there will be mean things said in the comments. It’s easy to say
mean things to a computer. Harder to someone’s face. I’ve learned to
take the hit and move on. I never delete the comments unless they are
spam or porn or hate speech (and I don’t mean hating me). I figure by
leaving them there, I am airing their hateful views for everyone to
see. And I love it when Jackson or someone else who knows me well gives
them a piece of mind.
I have opted toward a similar stance and have only deleted comments a handful of times in 8 years of blogging. Even though it stings to see those words come across a computer screen, I leave them there, unless…especially if…they are referencing somebody else. I can take my licks, but I won’t let my blog be a forum for others’ hatred toward the world. Fred wrapped up his short post (though longer than Brad’s) with this great thought:
But why live in public? It is necessary? No it is not. But humans are
social beings. We were social in caves. We are social in cyberspace.
And those who are extroverts will be extroverts online. And there is a
lot to be gained from living publicly online. As long as you know where
to draw the line.
And therein lies the problem. Many people don’t know where to draw the line. For a look into this world of online social activity I clicked through to Emily Gould’s recent article in the New York Times simply titled “Exposed“.
This is a lengthy article, probably one of the longest articles that I’ve read online in a long time. Usually if something can’t be summarized in the first 1,000 characters I don’t read it. However, this article had me captivated.
For ten pages (web pages anyway, five minutes worth of reading) she goes into great detail about her online adventure with Gawker, a site devoted to “media gossip and pop culture round the clock”. Not a site that I have ever been to before, nor will I go in the future, but it’s obviously very popular.
Emily talks about how her obsession led to the destruction of at least two relationships, a job and maybe even her sanity. It’s a gripping and somewhat sad tale, although Penelope Trunk does not seem to have any sympathy for her. On the fourth page of her article, Emily mentioned another blogger that openly stated, “attention is my drug” and infers strongly that she can relate. She even talked about the addiction of receiving comments on her blog:
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. The metaphor is so exact, in fact, that maybe it isn’t a
metaphor at all.
I encourage you to read the entire article, it can be found here. If you are a blogger or a tweeter, I especially encourage you to read this. If you click through to the comments you will find that she gets absolutely blasted, as does The Times, for this article.
In part two of this post I’m going to discuss what fuels attention blogging and oversharing from my point of view. It’s not scientific and it’s not pretty, but I’m pretty sure it’s accurate in too many circumstances. It may hit too close to home. Stay tuned.
