Meta-Exposed!

Ok, so how post-ironic is this? I’m blogging about an article about blogging! Even more entangled, I’m about to blog about the online comments of an article about the online comments on blogs. My thoughts about Emily Gould’s front page article, titled, “Exposed,” for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, posted on NYTimes.com Thursday morning, can be summarized by bits and pieces of the 727 readers’ comments so far amassed.
First, from “ML:”

Why is this article on the top of the times home page??

The comments of one “Joseph” echoes the sentiment.

I expect more from the New York Times.

His comment has so far been “recommended” by 183 other readers. The comments range from the annoyed and angry to the philosophical. “von” from detroit writes one of my favorites:

It sounds to me, Emily, that perhaps it’s time to dust off your Sartre…is not blogging but a modern version of the personal hue and cry of the self for meaning, for some sort of proportion to the obliterating anonymity of being one solipsistic bag of goo in the anthill among the vacuum of the cosmos?

(A side note: an interesting variety of uses of everyone’s favorite prefix: “post.” “von” refers to his “post-New York friends,” and another commenter to “today’s post-teens.” I wonder whether they have reverted the prefix back to its pre-ironic, temperal meaning, or if they know something I don’t about New York and teenhood.)

The article in question will apparently grace that pedestal of New York journalism; nay, any journalism, on Sunday: the cover of the Magazine. In it, former Gawker editor Emily Gould laments about her years spent under a magnifying glass of her own creation. Rather than using her personal narrative as a starting point to probe into the interesting, if already explored phenomenon of our generation’s obsession with posting their lives online, she drones on for 10 online pages about herself. Gould bemoans the internet culture of “oversharing” in an article that contains lines like:

On our last day, I congratulated myself on having made it through the trip without letting these jokes turn into real betrayal. And then, 20 minutes outside the city on the Long Island Railroad on the way home, Josh kissed me.

A major character in the article is the legion of anonymous commenters, first’s on Gould’s “private” blog, Emily Magazine, and then on Gawker. She loves them and hates them and loves to hate them. After leaving Gawker, she writes:

For months, I thought that I hated the commenters who tormented me. Now, sickeningly, I missed them.

The whole article is so self-referential that it seems bizarre that the only time she addresses what exactly she is doing in the Times Magazine is with this throw-away line:

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.

But it’s more than that. The New York Times know about Web 2.0, you see, Emily. So by throwing this ridiculous, self-centered article into the ether for the wrath of a new kind of commenter, Gould is instantaneously undermining any lesson that may have come out of the article. And that’s the most idiotic thing about it.

The issue of privacy–which Gould never formally discusses–is actually a fascinating one, for, contrary to what one might believe, privacy is not guaranteed to us in the Constitution. In a 2005 New York Times op-ed, Dan Savage wrote that the American right to privacy was implied in the 1961 Supreme Court Ruling Griswald vs. Connecticut, which legalized birth control, and further confirmed in Roe vs. Wade. And we all know how some members of the Supreme Court feels about those rulings. (Click on that last link, I dare you. It’s the website of a group that believes that birth control is equivalent to abortion.)

Savage writes:

In the 1980’s, Chief Justice John Roberts was a Reagan administration aide who wrote a memo questioning the “so-called” right to privacy. During his confirmation hearings the press-release brigade at People for the American Way warned that these documents suggested that he believed that the Constitution did not guarantee a right to privacy.

In his hearings, when asked if he could a locate a right to privacy in the Constitution, Judge Roberts said that he could - but he was vague about what it actually covered. Heterosexual married couples have a right to use birth control, he conceded, but that was about as far as he was willing to go.

So we may or may not have a constitutional right to privacy. (Savage goes on to encourage Democrats to propose a Constitutional ammendment guaranteeing one.) I think that means that we should take our privacy where we can get it and where we want it. But for some people, that might mean nowhere. And while I sympathize with Gould for regretting her “recent indisgressions,” I wish she had been given somewhat of a smaller soapbox upon which to complain about them.

Edit 12:41 pm: Just found another post-commenter. “Matt Brosseau, New Jersey,” in an editor-selected comments, describes the whole article as “post-logical.” He writes:

By accepting this assignment, you don’t seem to have learned your lesson at all. It’s very post-logical.

Now, come one, Matt. We can’t assign a whole era of post-logicality on the basis of one silly girl who will never learn her lesson.