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.