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.

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[The Comm's newest contributor looks at the human cost of Juicy Campus. Or perhaps the lack thereof...]

Okay, that’s somewhat false. However, the Joan Jett and the Blackhearts song really does ring true to my personal beliefs. Seeing as my name has appeared on JuicyCampus’s most viewed post, eloquently entitled “TOP TEN SLUTS OF O7 08 HOT OFF THE PRESS!!!”, I think I can fairly assume I have a “bad reputation” in some circles on Columbia’s campus. I can also tell you quite honestly that I laughed out loud when I first read my name on this “slut list”.

I’m not delusional- I don’t think whichever lame individuals actually wrote the list intended to be comedic when they compiled this load of crap. However, I do find it pretty funny that they were bitter enough about well, the fact that they are (probably) lame and ugly, to feel the need to hate on those of us who have been spared their unlucky state of existence.

I also find it entertaining that second and third sources were consulted in order to publish the fact that I “start from the top of the ladder and work my way down”, and despite this pathetic effort of consulting multiple sources- the writers couldn’t figure out how to spell the word “number” correctly. Yes girls, it has a u.

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From Fair Alma’s tyranny. And also freedom for yours truly, who’ll get a much-needed break from all the late-breaking campus and national mischief. But the Commentariat won’t be completely gone during the Spring holiday–for one thing we’ve got this Jeffrey Sachs Slate book club to dissect. Stay tuned for a couple posts every day on issues that could very well be meaningful to your life. Or not.In the “meaningful” category is this vindication of every college student’s best friend. If America’s bastion of intellectual snobbery thinks Wikipedia is worth defending, then it can’t be quite the proletarian devil that certain elitist commentators have made it out to be. At minimum it means we know where to go for virtual “drinks at the faculty club”–which is a line as clever as any I’ve read this year.

One of the top videos on YouTube today is a Web 2.0 masterpiece entitled Cat of a Thousand Faces, the first of a presumably 1000-part series in which various cats make various faces. Now, I’m not one of those people who anxiously reloads The Plank every five minutes, nor am I one who didn’t spend countless hundreds of hours on this websitein middle and high school (and yes, college too, jackasses). But for proof that that the Internet really is just an inextricable race to the bottom, I urge you to go to our sidebar, click on “IvyGate,” and wonder at this website’s pathetic existence.

As best I can tell (being the all-too frequent IvyGate reader than I am), IvyGate is one big backfired joke. At its best, it was (yes, was) a send-up of the self-hating, hyper-intelligent, hyper-loaded East Coast set, and a chance for Joe Ivy Leaguer to remind himself that he’s perfectly normal. It was self-therapy at the expense of others, particularly for those of us chilling out in the Ivy League’s bottom half–Columbia ain’t Yale, but it also doesn’t have flag-burners or pathological assholesof the Aleksey Vayner stripe. And Dartmouth ain’t Columbia, but at least its drinking problem puts ours to shame–and at least it didn’t have to put up with this guy, or these guys (or, in case you’ve forgotten about them, these guys).

In a sense, the IvyGate reader was (and I guess is) like the closet dittoheadstealing a few segments of Rush during his lunch break. Both thrive off of a shared sense of condescension, out of the kind of superiority complex that can only be spun from one’s deepest insecurities–not that Savage and company were quite up to Limbaugh’s level, but the Gate did offer the self-loathing Ivy Leaguer a much-needed chance to wallow in the intellectual gutter. Of course, now the joke’s gotten old, and the site’s trademark embitterment now says more about its producers than its consumers.

Yes, one recoils at O’Connor and Savage and their ilk–I can almost imagine them waking up in the morning, scanning the Ivy rags for some sophomore columnist to hurl shit at, and then going to work as if they weren’t spending hours every day obsessing over shower sexor Harvard student government or shower sex, salvaging whatever fleeting joy can be derived from flaming people four or five years younger than them. These people are such assholes that even Bwog is probably a little intimidated. Of course, Bwog is another organization that thrives off of a self-appointed sense of exceptionality, and, like IvyGate, it haughtily positions itself above the neurotic madness that its coverage has ironically come to typify. But while Bwog traffics in more or less substantive journalism, IvyGate does not. It traffics in public humiliation and little else.

So while this postdid save me the trouble of trashing Anthony Kelly’s article myself, the fact that IvyGate even caresabout this kind of thing speaks to everything I hate about the website. I care about what’s in today’s Crimson about as much as the Crimson’s opinion blog editor cares about what’s in today’s Spectator. Only when the editors of IvyGate feel like watching the sublimated bitterness of a few dozen disaffected Ivy Leaguers play itself out is the opinion page of a college paper a couple hundred miles away even distantly relevant to anyone or anything. Then again, the joke isn’t really on us anymore.

And then again, I’m no less loyal an IvyGate reader now than I was two days ago. Which is to say I probably read it a lot more than you do. Trust me.