I joked at the time that this was all the reason I needed to keep chatting. The truth is, by 2008, I’d largely quit using most chat programs, except for Gtalk, which I used to talk exclusively to my friend Dean, who excels at coworking. And when I say “excels at coworking,” I mean he never makes casual conversation, largely stays on topic of whatever we’re writing at the time, and leaves long pauses between messages be. He’s busy — I’m busy. He gets it.

Time went on and, as I used that Gmail account for more interviews and personal things, a lot of people were added to my chat list. It was convenient because having them on my IM list meant that if I needed their help for something we were working on, I could reach them right away.

But then something terrible happened. People started to message me all the time. Now, I dig all of you, and I would love to talk to all of you, but the bottom line is that you’re not the only ones messaging me and I don’t have time to chat with all of you. I can’t just switch back and forth between something I’m writing and the chat window. I envy you your ability to multitask and the fact some of you have the ability to play at work – I do. If you have openings to sit around and blog and chat at your company, totally contact me.

As it is, I don’t have that luxury. The bottom average for me is six posts a day – and that doesn’t include interviews and research I am doing for future posts. I need the time I’m at my computer to focus on what I’m doing.

And apparently, no one gives a damn if someone’s status is set to Busy.

I’m tired of explaining that I’d love to talk but I can’t. I shouldn’t have to explain to every single person who messages that I can’t chat when my status has a paragraph describing that I’m not available and I’d appreciate no messages unless they’re work-related.

So last night, I quit Gtalk. And guess what happened? I got everything done that I needed to do. And I loved it.

This is what it means: if you’re a good friend and you need me for something, shoot me a text. One text, I don’t need more. I’ll get back to you when I can. If you don’t have my number, direct message me or @reply on Twitter, or send me an e-mail. If you e-mail, keep it simple. I need to be able to get the gist within the first two seconds of opening it. The inverted pyramid – you know how newspapers do it? Who, what, why, where, when, how, in 28 to 32 words. Like that.

As for calling – I hate speaking on the phone and will avoid it as much as possible unless you’re my parents or it’s business-related. So don’t be hurt if you get shot to voicemail immediately. It’s not you, it’s me.

I sincerely appreciate it.

Good things cost money to make and consumers like good things. The media/internet/etc 2.0 mindset is that everybody wants to shop at the flea market when in reality, plenty of consumers are willing to buy Christian Louboutin.

I could get all the free fashion content I want online but 98 percent of those sites don’t have access. They don’t get to pull in any sample they want, they’re not flying to Market and Fashion Week, etc. around the world to find the things I can’t find myself. So, in addition to consuming the stuff people are giving away on the internet, I pay to have greater access through other outlets because for me, that’s the value.

This is how consumers operate. It’s why despite that there are free football games all weekend long, hundreds of thousands of people pony up major cash to have subscription packages. What drives consumers to want to pay for things (including content on platforms) is value, driven by either access or quality.

Free also signals that something isn’t worth paying for, even if it is. It’s something people see all the time in service industries like consulting and PR. The second somebody says, “I won’t pay to have XYZ from a company,” it signals that the company has little true value to that person. By giving away your product for free out of the gate, you’ve trained them on this perception. The only way out is to create a second channel of value and work to migrate them over. Some will go, some won’t. That is how it goes.

Charging consumers for quality and access doesn’t mean they won’t like you. In fact, it’s likely the other way around. Getting them to adapt to paying for products that cost money is more a marketing than a business problem. Create value or the perception of value, and work to migrate those who are interested towards it. It’s a basic truism in any business on any platform, offline or not.

1. You and 6,302 People

I work from home, which basically means I don’t have the luxury of leaving work at the office. The workweek for me is seven days long – the only difference is that on some days, the post office and bank don’t work. In order to ensure against having no life and dying a miserable career death due to burnout, I divide my engagements into two categories: business and social.

Because so much of my business time is devoted to content creation and managing blogs, unless what you’re doing is directly related to what I do, I’m not going to be inclined to meet you. It’s not that you’re not amazing, I’m sure you are. There are just hundreds of people doing sex research and writing books on relationships that I’m going to want to do lunch with first.

Though, for the record, allow me to say that it’s far more likely that I’ll interview these people over the phone or e-mail than actually meet them in person.

Oh, I don’t think I need to mention this, but “let’s meet to talk about sex,” is not a loophole into my day-planner. If I had a penny for every time a man said that to me, I’d be able to fish this country out of debt, buy it, and then have you removed to Guantanamo for immediate waterboaring. I am so serious, that I’d go as far as to strongly recommend you don’t even joke about this to me. Unless you want to elicit an eyeroll and my immediate disdain, of course, in which case, by all means feel free.

2. Bait Me

My experience in a corporate environment has taught me that nine times out of 10, meetings are totally pointless. I must be baited, and since this is not a social situation, your winning personality won’t register as bait. Incentivize me.

And by that I don’t mean some nebulous “let’s meet to talk about how maybe we can [insert idea you can't or aren't really willing to make happen].” I mean “let’s meet and talk about [thing] so I can get started on [concrete things to mobilize aforementioned thing].” If that statement implies we’ve already spoken before, you’re half right.

Due to time constraints, I probably won’t be doing much (or, more likely, any) talking with you on the phone. A successful business meeting will come to pass after we’ve exchanged a few e-mails. These e-mails will not be “hi, how are you? My name is so and so and [insert entire CV] and I was thinking we could maybe talk about some opportunities together.” They will be relevant and concise: “You: sex blogger. Me: [profession]. I am working on [project] and I think it would be mutually beneficial if you participated by [activity].”

That’s all you need. Amazing, isn’t it? You don’t even have to tell me why it’s beneficial! Like obscenity, I will know beneficial when I see it.

3. It’s Money, Honey

If there is no relevance and no real incentive and especially if you have the audacity to use the words “pick your brain,” you better be willing to pay me.

I know you’re sitting there thinking “who the hell does she think she is”? I’ll help you out. I’m AV Flox and if you want to meet with me to pick my brain, it must be because you find my ideas valuable. Guess what valuable means? That’s right. That it has worth. And guess what? You’re paying. And when I say you’re paying, I don’t mean for dinner (though if you asked, you will be paying for that, too). I mean you’re paying for the value of my brain, which I have set at a starting rate of $2,000, in full and up front.

Nothing personal, baby. Business is business.

I don’t recall where I first read it, but the notion has troubled me since I did. Death never was again a question of assets so much as one of liabilities. If I were to die tomorrow, just what would I leave behind?

I’m a wanderer, traveling the world on gypsy feet. I’d rather buy a new wardrobe than carry what I own—fashion’s the fastest expiring art anyway. One should never become attached to more than she could pack in the dead of night and carry under the cover of darkness. (With comments like these, why am I so surprised when people write me asking if I’m a spy?)

Seriously, though, nothing is irreplaceable. Except the mementos. Pictures and diaries and letters and lists and notes have followed me around the world in boxes. They’re still making their way to me now. Some from as far south as Peru and others as far out as Micronesia.

Imagine I died. What would people find?

“You can tell a lot about a woman from the things she left behind,” opens the Vanity Fair piece about Marilyn Monroe. The magazine has dedicated much of its 25^th anniversary issue to the gorgeous and tragic starlet.

The main feature, written by Sam Kashner, is the story of two filing cabinets filled with Monroe’s personal effects, which until this year had been in possession of Marilyn Monroe’s (ready for this brainful?) business manager’s sister-in-law’s son, Millington Conroy.

At Frank Sinatra’s suggestion, Marilyn Monroe kept her life inside two filing cabinets—letters, invoices, financial records, and the mementos that meant the most to her. After her tragic death, in 1962, at the age of 36, the cabinets, together with an assortment of jewels, fur coats, and other personal belongings, were stashed away by the actress’s business manager, Inez Melson. This secret trove would remain virtually unknown to the world for more than four decades, until photographer Mark Anderson began an epic two-year project of documenting it. His photographs, made public for the first time, offer new insights into the life of Hollywood’s most iconic figure.

How we are perceived to be isn’t really who we are. To a large extent, we can control the kind of information we release about ourselves and the kind of impression we make on others, both online and offline.

I don’t have secrets, really, but I’m an insanely secretive person anyway. My sister does a mean impression of me at thirteen, letting her come into my room after having sworn she would keep her hands in her lap and not look at anything but my face. Nothing has changed: when she came to visit me in Peru in 2006, she saw first hand how rarely I let even my dearest friends into my apartment.

People who know me think it’s endearing. “She locks empty boxes!” my aunt told my husband before we got married. “Don’t try to open them and she’ll show you the world.” They think it’s endearing. And I’m glad because looking at it objectively, I think it’s downright neurotic. Well, thank god I’m a writer: to a certain extent this kind of eccentricity is expected.

On impulse shortly after reading the Kashner piece in Vanity Fair, I pulled out a desk drawer and spilled all the contents on my coffee table and began to look through the contents objectively, as through a stranger’s eyes.

Who am I?

A woman who receives thank you notes and postcards and keeps them, though she doesn’t keep a single bank statement. A woman who travels a lot by plane and occasionally by train and who scribbles on maps when she travels by road. A woman who is photographed a lot (who took these photos?) and who keeps photos of other people with no indication of who they are (lovers? Friends?). A lot of pictures of places, the sort a tourist would take, except with no people in them (why? Did she actually go there or did people send them to her? Or does she travel alone and therefore have no one to take photos of her in these wondrous places?).

She gets a lot of letters that begin with, “I’ve never met you, but…” What does she do? Why do people send her things–letters mention art, perfumes, chocolates, books, clothes, shoes, flowers, manuscripts? Why?

“How does it feel being the one person in the world I can send this to?” a letter asks. “Everyone who reads these pages comes away with a loathing for their author. That is how I measure their worth.”

The postmark shows this letter came from a prison.

Why her?

I couldn’t answer that now even if I wanted to.

We were driving back from Arizona when we got the call.

I had my head out the window, enjoying the sun and wind as we cruised 80MPH across the border into California. I turned to look at my husband, who looked at me briefly before saying, plainly, “Henry died.”

Henry was eighty, but age didn’t really matter. He was a mathematician and even though I can’t do math to save my life, I still love it. We connected through this appreciation and a mutual love of horse races.

My clearest memory of him is sitting before him as he sat in for dialysis. He was wearing a shirt that said, “you’re young and stupid, I’m old and treacherous. You don’t stand a chance.”

He seemed ashamed of being there and needing that machine. I took his hand and smiled.

“How many decimals of pi do you know off the top of your head?”

Oh, he went on forever.

One of the first gifts I got from someone who read my blog, someone I’d never met, was at the age of seventeen or eighteen. He bought me over a hundred dollars worth of Andy Warhol books for no reason other than that I loved Warhol and he, the reader, loved my writing. (To date, I’ve not met him.)

It’s possible that I read the quote I mentioned earlier among these, though I don’t think so. What sticks most in my mind from these books is how in Pat Hackett’s Warhol Diaries, Warhol mentioned the cost of everything, so cabbing uptown with Bianca Jagger always something like, “split a cab with Bianca ($4).” There is a weird magic in seeing how human the people you adore are. Andy Warhol, one of the few examples of an artist who was successful in his own time, was insanely frugal? He fussed about sharing cabs? Really?

Hackett’s dedication to Warhol is admirable and that’s not hard to miss, especially when you compare her comments to those of, say, Mary Woronov, author of Swimming Underground.

Just as you can’t separate the scientist from the experiment, you can’t separate the person doing the remembering from the memory of you. The amount of regard with which you are remembered is what spells the difference between a prurient exploitation of your memory and a tribute.

“Much of the ‘side of Marilyn that no one has ever seen before’ includes ordinary things like receipts, telegrams, bottles of Chanel No. 5, and checkbooks,” writes Dodai Stewart, senior editor at Jezebel. “Does this stuff just seem mundane in this day and age, because we live in a celebrity culture where we know all about Britney’s meds, Lindsay’s post-rehab life and Paris Hilton’s Valtrex prescription?”

It’s the typical vulture culture reaction. But there is something different in the way that the Monroe items are presented. This isn’t a spread in a gossip rag or a vulgar shot offered at PerezHilton.com. The pictures of Monroe’s effects are taken against a backdrop of rose petals and flowers.

Kashner writes:

By the time I first spoke with [Mark Anderson], he had been photographing Monroe’s personal correspondence, her jewelry, her furs, and her handbags for almost two years, and he admitted he had fallen a little bit in love with her, just as all her photographers had… Anderson was haunted by the ghost of Marilyn. He was having trouble sleeping at night, at one point he was drinking too much, and on occasion he called Marietta, his wife, “Marilyn.” He had decided that the best way to photograph the items in the archive—the 400 canceled checks, the ledgers and memos and letters—was to place them against a backdrop of rose petals. So he was spending his mornings at the Los Angeles Flower Market buying roses, like a hopeful suitor. “Imagine the power of this woman who has been dead for 45 years,” Marietta observed, “that I was becoming jealous.”

As creepy as it may sound, Anderson’s love for the icon shows. I’m no Marilyn Monroe junkie and even I was moved looking over some of those letters and receipts, presented with the care and attention to detail that only someone who loved you could exercise.

It’s with this love that I look over pictures of Henry and his notebooks where he played with numbers day after day.

For the first time since I became obsessed with the notion of what people would see of me were I to suddenly die, I smile and hope that one day, someone will care enough to go through my stuff and remember who I was with love.

I’m going to miss you, Henry. You genius, you darling, you cranky eccentric.

I can hear you now, telling me to quit with the emo shit and get back to work. All right, all right! But only because I know that you know that I mean every word.

———- Original message ———-
From: Laura Roberts
To: AV Flox
Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008
Subject: Fwd: Lolita issues …

HOLY SHIT! We’re creating controversy with the Lolita issue already and it’s not even officially launched! I just got an e-mail, apparently, from Nabokov’s son, Dmitri.

Roberts had just introduced the Black Heart Lolita issue in “V for Vixen” a column she writes for hour.ca. Before I could continue to the alleged Nabokov response, I clicked through to her article on my RSS feed and began reading.

The “Lolita issue” of Black Heart Magazine, my online magazine, will be released this Friday at blackheartmagazine.com. It was originally conceived as a celebration of Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal novel, as well as an exploration of many other kinds of forbidden love. So perhaps it should have been anticipated, but I was still surprised when some submissions took the theme as a license to defend pedophiles and to question the condemnation of child molestation.

While I can certainly appreciate the questioning of society’s supposedly logical rules, and applaud writers who are brave enough to probe our most cherished taboos, I absolutely cannot agree with those who seek to do violence to others. Rape is rape, no means no, and Lolitas will always be off-limits.

I stopped, getting a sudden inkling about what Nabokov’s issue was.

———- Original message ———-
From: Dmitri Nabokov
To: Laura Roberts
Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008
Subject: Re: Lolita issues …

Laura Roberts,

You are the archetype of hypocrites. How many copies of your backwards arse do you plan to peddle? Read about yourself in the imminent Original of Laura.

The “arse” my editor is peddling to which Nabokov referred is the image on the cover of the issue of Black Heart, which hour.ca ran alongside Roberts’ column. Meanwhile, The Original of Laura, for those of you who have been living under a rock, is the unfinished book Vladimir Nabokov left, which is to be published despite his dying wishes.

Roberts responded to Nabokov’s e-mail:

———- Original message ———-
From: Laura Roberts
To: Dmitri Nabokov
Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008
Subject: Re: Lolita issues …

Mr. Nabokov,

To respond to your recent email, that is not “[my] backwards arse” on the cover of Black Heart Magazine, nor have I ever claimed to be a cover model. The buttocks in question belong to a model in Toronto, I believe, but I can ask my photographer for more details and contact information, if you’d like them.

As far as being the “archetype of hypocrites,” I would like to understand your point fully. What, exactly, do you object to as hypocritical in my piece?

As for reading The Original of Laura, I look forward to its publication, as do many other members of the literary community.

Best,
Laura Roberts

“I’m not even sure I understand his concerns beyond being a knee-jerk response to anything with the name Nabokov attached without his consent,” Roberts confided to me. “And I didn’t think that publishing an issue of a magazine with a Lolita theme was cause for controversy. It’s not like I need permission to say the book’s name, to discuss its literary merits or potential controversy, or otherwise bring forward topics that relate, such as pedophilia and the over-sexualization of children.”

Roberts was missing the point. Nabokov’s concern isn’t so much with the issue, which he has not even read, but with the content of her column, which expressed her surprise that a Lolita-themed issue would invite pieces that question the legal age of consent.

“The novel Lolita, in its most literal reading, is the story of a pedophile seeking to defend his crimes,” Roberts writes in her column.

Though one might have expected a public outcry against its shocking subject matter at the time of its publication, Lolita was met with neither an outraged public nor any demands that it be banned. Indeed, it would appear that art excuses everything, as the fictional protagonist Humbert Humbert’s defence “She seduced me!” has been taken at face value by readers ever since the book’s release in 1955.

Should we be shocked by Lolita? It’s just fiction, after all, yet it holds many truths about the workings of the predatory mind. Funny how it’s never described as a penetrating insight into the warped mind of a child molester, potentially raising questions about its author’s inspiration. Instead Nabokov’s masterpiece is always excused on the grounds of its artistic merit, and we cannot censor art. But is Lolita really art, or merely smut in art’s clothing?

It’s a loaded gun to play with for the editor of a ‘zine that touts itself as containing the “dirtiest minds in literature.”Black Heart is, after all, a publication that prides itself in running the raunchiest smut that contemporary writers have to offer. This publication is Roberts’ brainchild and to suddenly go from a laissez-faire attitude about exploring all sexual taboos to questioning the fascination of some with school girl uniforms was, at the very least, contradictory.

If anything, the editor of such a publication should be reinforcing the notion that what we create doesn’t necessarily have to reflect who we are. Does Chuck Palahniuk go around killing people? Does Quentin Tarantino? David Lynch? No. There is an immense difference between writing about a crime committed against others and actually committing a crime against others.

The last thing we need is a freak frenzy of censorship across creative writing classrooms and I would like to think that Black Heart would be the champion of this notion instead of sitting, years after the fact, questioning whether Nabokov was a closeted child molester.

It makes me think of all the instances that writing has been brought to the public’s attention as depicting clear intent of harm.

I will never forget, for example, how following the horrors of the Virginia Tech massacre, the media jumped on Cho Seung-hui’s plays. FOX News ran pictures of the killer, with the words, “KILLER WROTE VIOLENT PLAYS,” across them. They weren’t the only ones.

After hearing from multiple news sources how obvious this man’s mental instability was in his disturbing writing, I caved and read “Richard McBeef,” one of his so-called tell-tale plays.

McBeef is about a former football player who gets trapped in a series of odd jobs and never amounts to much anything. Somehow, he gets involved with a woman whose husband dies; they marry a month later. She has a 13-year-old son, who hates his new step-father.

The ten page play occurs over the course of a few hours–the step-father tries to confront the miscreant in an effort to get closer to him and receives only verbal abuse. The teen accuses him of trying to molest him and tells his mother, who becomes angry and violent toward the father. The father escapes the blows and hides in a car outside, where his teen step-son joins him. The teen shoves a cereal bar into his step-father’s mouth. Choking, the frustrated man tries to push him away, he “lifts his large arms and swings a deadly blow at the thirteen-year-old.”

It’s an extremely bad play. In a Newsweek article titled “He Was Just Off,” Pat Wingert, Lynn Waddell and Arian Campo-Flores report a professor saying Cho’s writing was silly and “very adolescent.” That’s exactly what it was. It’s so easy to say in retrospect, “oh! They should have known! He was writing about people being killed!” But give me a break. We can’t jump so easily to those conclusions.

What happened was horrific and gruesome, yes. But there are a million people who write disturbing things and never harm anyone.

So is it fair to question whether Nabokov was a predator? Shouldn’t we be glad his book, which Roberts readily admits has literary merit, was well-received by the public? Shouldn’t that make smut writers like the ones who seek shelter at Black Heart Magazine, often under the guise of pen names for fear of what their creative pursuit could do to their careers, feel like we do have a chance in this world to continue writing what we like, no matter how far we push the boundaries?

Nabokov’s final response to Roberts was far more collected than his initial reply and closed with a clincher that I’m sure my editor is not likely to forget for a long time.

———- Original message ———-
From: Dmitri Nabokov
To: Laura Roberts
Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008
Subject: Re: Lolita issues …

Dear Laura Roberts,

First of all, I regret any possible incomprehension on my part. Secondly, thanks for your kind offer, but I was referring to the context, not the model’s actual assets. As for hypocrisy, I had the distinct impression that you were buttressing your argument with an ambiguous visual plug. I do not object to a glimpse of the female anatomy. I do question trotting out that image in bad faith. It is the nature of some humans to find titillating on the sexual playground anything considered deviant on the sexual battleground. I trust you found better things to do as a teen than the bored adolescents who signed a pact to become pregnant. Enjoy Laura, unless you find its heart too black for your tastes.

DN

Having said all this, one has to give Roberts credit for being open enough to bring to light her own reservations about the topic. It’s true—even the wildest deviants and staunchest supporters of a sex-positive world have their boundaries. This is hers. And if this isn’t the best way to send off an issue on taboos, I don’t know what is.

The error got got a lot of people talking about Jobs’s health again. See, he was diagnosed with a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer in 2003 and had a successful surgery to remove the tumor nine months later. But after the Worldwide Developers Conference, where Jobs appeared looking gaunt, rumors had been circulating that the CEO was ill again and everyone from The New York Post to Valleywag was talking about it.

The resounding answer from Apple was that Jobs’s health is a private matter.

“But is it really?” asked Joe Nocera at The New York Times:

“The question surrounding any kind of corporate disclosure always is: Is it material?” said Larry S. Gondelman, a lawyer with Powers Pyles Sutter & Verville. “And there is no bright line test in determining materiality.”

A spokesman for the Securities and Exchange Commission said that the law defined materiality as information that “the reasonable investor needs to know in order to make an informed decision about his investment.”

The question of materiality doesn’t only apply to corporations. Newspapers are constantly asking themselves this question as well: does the public need to know?

In today’s celebrity-crazed world where more people read Perez Hilton and Gawker than they do newspapers, where a single celebrity photo sells for more than most journalists could hope to make in a year, it’s not surprising that we have forgotten what materiality is.

THE DEETS BINGE

I bring all this up because after reading a piece on Boinkology about Nick Douglas’s recent breakup with Melissa Gira Grant, I spent four hours bingeing on several other of his love affairs as they are chronicled across Tumblr.

It felt wrong to read post after post of such incredibly personal details. This wasn’t tabloid-style reporting about the writer and former Valleywag editor’s love life, this was a sort of catch basin of all the dirt on the guy, some written with fury, some with sadness and some with a sadistic smirk.

I couldn’t look away. Considering the comments from Douglas and Chaya, one of his previous interests, about how their friend counts everywhere have doubled since the story broke mid-month, I’m not the only one.

So the public apparently wants to know. But do we need to know?

OVERSHARING VS. FEUDING

“Oversharing the details of your life (Gyno exams! PMS! Grocery lists! Penis lengths!) is one thing,” writes Caroline McCarthy on her Tumblr. “Actively carrying out feuds for all to see is a whole different can of Sour Patch gummi worms.”

But with no understanding of materiality, how are we to know the difference?

As far as I can tell, the only difference between a personal overshare like, “my boyfriend and I broke up” or “the dude I was flying in to see for a jet-set booty call just totes canceled on me last minute—asshole!” and a feud is that in a feud the boyfriend in question and booty call (or his girlfriend) get to publically respond to whatever you’re oversharing.

THE VENDETTA

A blogger who hasn’t suffered a morning-after-post shame attack hasn’t been blogging long enough, I always say, but it’s more a lamentation than an endorsement of impulse-posting.

A couple of posts ago I mentioned my husband’s position on my blog—that it’s like a conversation I have on a girl’s night out, one which features him but doesn’t need to include him. This is fine and well for my relationship, but it would be silly to pretend that what we said in our blogs only went as far as our friends. It doesn’t.

Some of the posts about Douglas are definitive overshares, but they read like they were written to vent pain and frustration. Some others, however, read more like a smear campaign.

“I knew he was a manwhore when I decided to let him ask me out, but I had no fucking clue that he made such a sport out of boinking girls from Twitter and Tumblr.” Sarah Hebarb wrote in her Tumblr. “I find my own experience with this guy deeply hilarious because he never did anything terrible to me, but reading Melissa’s and Chaya’s stories makes me feel real bad. This guy is scum; please avoid contact with this self-important creep. Really, guy. You’re not funny. Please give up.”

I don’t know Douglas, nor the women with whom he was involved, and I can’t deny that some of the things that were said about him made me feel slightly queasy, but for all the ache that he appears to have caused, I can ascertain one thing: they all made a choice. Nick Douglas did not force himself on them—he asked them out. Drunk sex or not, by all indications, these entanglements were consensual. So is a general call to arms for women to guard against this man justified?

In the words of his ex-girlfriend, Melissa Gira Grant, “why not go start a groupblog at dontfucknickdouglasagain.tumblr.com? That seems easier.”

STORIES AS MEDICINE

Earlier this year, I woke up to find my husband having sex with me. Annoyance at being awakened at such an ungodly hour turned to anger, then quickly to confusion: is this consensual? Marriage implies consent, right? I mean, you can’t rape your spouse, can you?

I did research. And then I blogged about it. I didn’t do it to hurt him, though it did hurt him and that’s why the post is no longer available. I did it to open up the discussion and I’m really glad I did. Not only did it bring to my attention other points of view on the matter about marriage and sex, but my unabashed overshare of something so deeply personal prompted others to share their own stories, stories that until that moment they had never confessed to a soul.

In her book Women Who Run With The Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes, “Stories are medicine… They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.”

Melissa Gira Grant is happy she overshared too. A couple of days after the internet exploded with hate over Nick Douglas, she met Sarah Hebarb for drinks.

“For all that this medium accelerated emotional catharsis blah blah blah today, having it connect me to pretty much the exact right woman to have a drink with tonight made the predictable hand-wringing over ‘Internet oversharing!’ almost irrelevant,” she wrote in her Tumblr later.

Stories heal. The good, the bad, and the ugly. But do they need to be online?

Could they be anywhere else in today’s world?

THE GOLDEN RULE

Earlier this year, web marketing guru Andy Beal responded to several publications that were speculating whether the cause of ad executive Paul Tilley’s suicide had been driven by posts about him on industry blogs.

“Perhaps all bloggers—in fact, all journalists—should stop and consider the personal psychological harm our words might have on an individual,” Beal wrote. “While it’s easy for us to post our scathing criticisms. we’re often desensitized to the harm we inflict—simply because we’re miles away, safe behind our web browser.”

If my husband had a blog, would I have shared so much? If he had been able to counter something equally personal about me, would I have still thought it was such a brilliant idea to “reach out to other women who may have shared my experience”?

In a way, public feuds like the one between Nick Douglas and the women he dated serve to remind us that we’re not the only ones in a relationship-, friendship- or partnership-gone-sour with internet access and the ability to talk shit. Maybe this will serve as a sort of check and balance to the wild west of overshares online. Not to silence stories, but to focus them on growth rather than destruction, on closure rather than the opening of old wounds.

In closing his post about Tilley’s suicide, Andy Beal wrote: “Perhaps going forward, we should all adopt a blogger’s Golden Rule: ‘Blog about others, as you would have them blog about you.’” Maybe now that it’s becoming more likely that they will blog about you, we can really begin taking that to heart.

THE APOLOGY

In her piece for the New York Times Magazine, Emily Gould wrote, “I had said that everyone was subject to judgment and scrutiny, and then, by judging and scrutinizing myself relentlessly, I’d invited others to do the same.”

Does the fact that you put your life and emotions on a blog serve as justification for others to treat you as a public figure? Is it right for me to be writing about Nick Douglas, Melissa Gira Grant, Chaya, and Sarah Hebarb, complete strangers whose situations I don’t really know beyond a handful of blog posts and then only because my corner of the internet recently exploded with information about them? I don’t know.

I’m sorry about your heartache. I’m sorry about those awful anonymous sites. I’m sorry about the vulture culture in which we live and love and write.

OFF THE RECORD

As for Steve Jobs, he called Joe Nocera at the New York Times late last month to set the record straight about his health.

“You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” Jobs said before he made Nocera swear the talk was off the record.

Jobs told him everything. And in what may be the best example of the difference between a journalist and a blogger, Nocera wrote a piece about Jobs but kept this information to himself.

OF POSSIBLE INTEREST

Susan Mernit, sex and relationships contributing editor at Blogher, and Viviane of TheSexCarnival are having an “Avoiding the Emily Gould Effect” panel at Arse Elektronica on September 26 in San Francisco, centered on oversharing, sex blogging and erotica. More…

Rex Sorgatz has a potential panel in the works for next year’s SXSW:i called “Sex Lives Of The Microfamous”: “What kind of person talks about their sex and dating life on the internet? Someone desperate for attention? Or someone who already has lots of it? For the microfamous, having a relationship in public is as much a potential career boost as it as a vulnerability.” More…

This entry was edited on November 15, 2008 to exclude the name of one of the people involved at their request.

(Your Googleicious rank is based on how much dirt about you is available online. For example: Chris Brogan, who has 317,000 available pieces about him, including several videos, isn’t as Googleicious as, say, Emily Gould, whose 60,400 results come jam-packed with all kinds of confessionals and exposes from ex-lovers and colleagues.)

Googling is now part of the dating process. It’s like running a background check from the comfort of your own home.

Except unlike a background check (or a simple search on CriminalSearches.com), the whole wide web is often much more thorough, revealing even the most embarrassing details, as provided by friends, colleagues, exes, enemies and the person in question themselves.

Case in point: a couple of years ago my sister and I were using YouTube to look for a commercial I’d been in for Coca-Cola Asia when we inadvertently landed on a video of my ex-boyfriend singing and dancing at some corporate benefit. He and I had had a horrible, drama-fueled break-up complete with a bull run and front page scoop but had since made up and become good friends.

Of course, even my esteem for him could not keep my tongue in check when I lay eyes on him dancing like a chipmunk caught on an electric fence.

“Oh dear god, I can’t believe I fucked him!”

I wondered whether he knew that he was online, at the reach of anyone with internet access. Then, almost reflexively, ran a search for myself. The number of items that came up were limited, but my Googleicious score was pretty high thanks to my blog.

I grew up on an island in the Pacific. A girl can only do so much reading, jet skiing, scuba diving, lounging and partying. By the age of thirteen, I had built myself a world online, a world I naively imagined no one in my daily life would find. Sexcapades, god-awful poetry, rants, obsessive odes of desperate want, tales of crashing comedowns—all of it was at the world’s fingertips via Google.

Richard and I had just started dating at the time. I mentioned it to him because I didn’t want it to be an issue later. What I didn’t know was that Richard had already read everything. Possessed, he’d Googled all night long and retraced my life without my knowledge.

“I got more than I bargained for.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, mortified.

“I felt wrong. You’ve been doing this online thing for so long, who am I to tell you I feel at odds about it? How could someone so new to your life demand that you stop doing something you enjoy?”

“You wanted me to stop blogging?”

“I would never ask you to do that. This is who you are.”

I wanted to tell him that no, I wasn’t my blog, that blogging was a byproduct of living, like a foot print I can’t help making as I walk. I didn’t—there was no point in confusing him with my self-indulgent rant. He had the main thing down clearly: that he should never ask me to quit blogging.

Then I started writing about him.

T.M.I.

My friend Katerina recently ended things with her boyfriend after a drawn-out battle about her musings on the internet.

Nathan didn’t mind that Katerina wrote until his ex-girlfriend and baby momma started stalking her on the internet. Now, Nathan’s ex knows everything about his new life with Katerina: the good, the bad and the downright mortifying.

“Why do you have to give her ammunition?” he demanded of Katerina when they last spoke. “If you could just stop, she would be out of our lives!”

“He’s wrong,” Katerina told me later. “His ex will stop at nothing. If she can’t stalk me on the internet, she’ll stalk me in the physical world. It’s who she is. I’m tired of having the same conversation over and over with Nathan about how I should feel ashamed for posting such personal stuff out on the Internet for the world to see. It’s like it’s my writing that’s the problem here. It’s not. Nathan enables that woman to continue with this craziness, if it’s not my blog, it will be something else.”

My husband gets where Nathan is coming from.

“Well, first of all, he needs to grow some balls,” Richard says, leaning against the kitchen counter and taking a sip of his Coke. “Next time he talks to his ex, he needs to tell her, ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re reading, I don’t want to hear what you’re thinking, all I need out of your pretty little mouth is what time I need to pick up my child.’ Aside from that, though, I have to agree with the guy. I mean, there’s a line. No one wants their personal details all over the place. No one wants to walk into a room and know people are thinking, ‘O-M-G, that’s the boyfriend, he can’t keep it hard,’ or ‘he makes her cum fucking her in the ass.’”

“So you draw the line at sex.” I conclude, looking at him.

“Not necessarily.”

“Where do you draw the line?”

“At too much information.”

“How much is too much?” I ask and then, I invoke Emily Gould. “Shouldn’t he have known this would happen? Shouldn’t he have known that she, a writer, would write about him?”

BLOG VS. PRINT MEDIA

“At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public space where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt,” wrote Emily Gould in her New York Times Magazine debut earlier this year. “Even having to take into account someone else’s feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way.”

Gould described how she and her ex-boyfriend Henry fought about the things she was writing about him in her blog.

“I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn’t generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings was part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself with being part of the world I described.”

Henry eventually left her life. The guy after him, Joshua David Stein crucified her for blogging about their relationship in a piece for Page Six.

My husband thinks writing for “legitimate publications” is somehow different than blogging.

Former relationship columnist Matt Katz doesn’t agree. Beyond the fact that a blog has no restrictions on form and word count, a column and a blog are essentially the same thing: a writer, exposed.

I ask him whether his soon-to-be wife ever minded being written about.

“Nope,” he replies. “But she read beforehand.”

Smart man. Now that old media is merging with new media, it doesn’t really matter what kind of writing is going on. Essay, poem, column, song lyrics—if it’s in print, chances are that it will be online, making someone’s Googleicious score soar.

FODDER

My husband’s attitude toward my blog changed when my posts changed from the praises of a fawning girlfriend in the throes of passion to the musings of a woman trying to make a relationship work with a man who didn’t have a lot of time, whose family largely hated her, and whose desires in the bedroom were different than hers.

Few mind being praised, but no one likes being cast in a critical light. Suddenly, the blog took center stage in our fights.

“Going to your blog for him must be like walking into a party where everyone is talking about him,” my mother reflected one night during the worst of the fights. “Only instead of quickly shushing themselves, they keep right on talking as though he’s not there at all.”

It’s true—it wasn’t just me who was talking about him in the void of the web. I was engaging a roomful of people about our life and they were waging in with everything from helpful advice to, “BTW, AV, you left your bra at my place last night!”

Richard never asked me to stop, but he referenced the blog enough to let me know he was displeased.

“You know what?” he screamed at me once. “Forget it. Just go fucking blog this!”

And I did.

PASSWORD-PROTECTED

“I offered to make the posts that mentioned Josh inaccessible by password-protecting them,” Gould wrote, recounting the last conversation she had with her ex, before he detailed their affair at Page Six.

Stein’s response? “You should be password-protected.”

Of course, according to Stein’s piece, the fateful talk outside Gawker headquarters went a little differently. He told her his privacy was his, not hers, and she smiled and responded, “You should have known better. After all, I’m a blogger.”

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

How do you sleep with a writer?

“Carefully,” writes fantasy author Catherynne Valente.

First of all, you must be prepared to see yourself dressed up in her clothes. In drag, in costume, in spangly eyeliner and a fedora hat.

You have to steel yourself, and accept the following with equanimity: She is going to write about you.

It takes a strong person to bear this: you’ll see your private jokes, your secrets, your childhood, the angle of your penis, the heft of your breasts, your personal griefs, your complaints, your house and your profession ground up and mulched, composted and laid out bare, for anyone to see, in her books. Her books are naked, and she will make you match her. It will not be comfortable. She’ll use everything you are—but she’s fair, she uses everything she is, too.

Every time you touch her, she will store that touch away, to be accessed later, spooled out, smoothed over, given to characters she hasn’t even thought of yet. Every time you fight, she will mentally catalogue your turns of phrase. If that seems inhuman, well, she can be like that. Computers are not so ruthless about retaining information.

Whether a novelist, columnist, poet, essayist or blogger, if you hang with a writer, you will eventually become fodder. But are Gould and Valente right? Is it fair to say that anyone who goes to bed with a writer should be prepared to see themselves exposed?

“At some point or another,” Katz says. “Even if it’s two years down the line.”

“Has anyone written really personal stuff about you?” I ask him.

“I can’t think of anyone who wrote too much.”

I’ve been written about. I think now about the first time it happened, on a bathroom stall in high school (yeah, I’m old. Back then we didn’t have JuicyCampus or GossipReport). I remember I walked into the cafeteria and the entire room went silent. With all eyes on me, I cocked an eyebrow and gave a little wave of my hand as if to say, “shoo,” and sat down at my little group’s corner table, hell-bent on not allowing my face to betray the insane beating of my heart. Over the course of that lunch, at least 20 people came over to tell me what they’d seen on the bathroom wall.

I refused to go look at it because I wanted to actively deny the person who’d done it the pleasure of a reaction. But I forgot about it and, later that week, found myself looking up at the words. I can’t remember now whether it said I was a “Perusian” slut or a bitch or both, but I will never forget the other things people had written around it, things like, “You spelled her name wrong,” “UR jealous cause your boyfriend thinks she’s hotter than U,” “Is Perusian someone of Persian-Russian ancestry?” and “She’s the antichrist.”

It wasn’t pleasant, but it was kind of funny, too. And flattering, in a weird way.

It wasn’t funny or flattering when an ex-fiance launched a blog about all the reasons I would make the worst wife, including the fact that I can’t have children, which at that time wasn’t something that I readily admitted. But it wasn’t the end of the world, either.

But maybe I’m not being fair. Maybe it’s different for people who blog and who expose themselves on a regular basis than it is for someone whose online presence is minimal.

FRONT ROW

It’s hard to draw the line. When you love someone, especially someone creative whose self expression is found in words, you don’t want to be the asshole who sets limits.

At some point, my husband stopped reading.

I have to admit that when he first told me he didn’t read my blog, I was a little hurt. In a way, it felt like he was rejecting a part of me (so much for “I’m not my blog,” huh?). But now I can appreciate the space he’s let me have within our relationship for me to explore what I think and what I feel—even when it’s about him and not always entirely positive. He views my blog now the same way he does my nights out with girlfriends: a sort of necessary thing he has no business being a part of, though he figures largely in the conversation.

“If there is anything you need to tell me, I know you’ll have no problem telling me,” he said. “I don’t need to read your blog because I have a front row seat to your life. I get parts of you no one else will ever see.”

He does.

Still, every once in a while, especially when we’re apart for longer than usual, I’ll spot him on my site and laugh because he always skips to the entries with pictures.

It’s funny–you’d think that someone who travels as much as I do would at least be updated on what was going on in the airline industry. (I guess that’s the problem with living on a semi-permanent vacation. I’d do something about it but then that would mean, you know, not living on a semi-permanent vacation. And, well, who the hell wants that?)

“American Airlines Ends Relationship With Kayak,” read the subject.

I read through the message, at first skimming, then growing more interested. It sounded messy. The sort of gruesome break-up drama queens like me dream about. I set out to dig up the details.

In a July 23 piece, TechCrunch explained the move: “Airlines don’t like the booking sites because they have to pay them a referral fee for every ticket they sell, as opposed to capturing the full fare when travelers book on their individual sites. Even though that only amounts to a few dollars per ticket, every dollar counts to the troubled airlines—especially now with fuel prices going sky-high and the consumer spending going down.”

Acording to the piece, Kayak was directing searches through partner booking site, Orbitz, thereby forcing American to pay double in booking fees, once to Kayak and then one more to Orbitz. To save up on the fees, American pulled its listing from the flight fare aggregator.

In response to the TechCrunch piece, Kayak CEO and co-founder of Orbitz Steve Hafner commented, “American asked us to suppress search results from competing websites as a condition to displaying their fares. This is simply not something that Kayak will do. Imagine Sony telling Best Buy that they couldn’t sell Panasonic?”

The comparison makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But SAT-style analogies are not really what corporate America is about, and one look over Hafner’s LinkedIn profile shows the dude’s not doing too shabby there despite his lack of prowess in the verbal department.

But what about American? In an article by Sean O’Neill at the BudgetTravel Blog, American came forth with a statement: “Kayak/Sidestep has advised American Airlines that they will no longer display our content. We are disappointed and hopeful that this issue can be resolved in the near future so that American Airlines will again display on the Kayak/Sidestep sites. Our schedules and fares remain available through many other Meta-Search Engines such as Mobissimo and Farecast for purchase through our award-winning website, AA.com.”

WTF! It really is like a game of he said/she said, don’t you love it?!

What we know is that Kayak works very closely with Orbitz and cheaptickets.com (look over their providers for a comprehensive look at where Kayak gets their fares). Why? Brett at The Crankyflier explains Kayak’s need for online travel agents: “Backfill. It’s hard to develop a relationship with every airline, and some don’t ever want to participate, so Kayak would have an incomplete offering if it couldn’t fill in the blanks with an online travel agent.”

He refutes TechCrunch’s conclusions that this is about a double fare American is paying:

It is possible that some flights are being shown through Orbitz and not AA.com, but my last search showed the opposite was true. The reality is that American and Orbitz have different connections with different data transfer speeds to Kayak, so different numbers of flights results get returned. So you will have some occasions when one seller shows up and not the other, but ideally they would both show up on each flight. This is good for you, because sometimes you can find one site happens to be cheaper than the rest…. One thing that seems certain is that American would never pay a double fee… AA will either pay Kayak directly or Orbitz will pay Kayak and American will pay Orbitz its usual commission.

But if American is just looking to save a buck by making everyone come by its site, it would have to pull from all online travel agents, not just Kayak.

So, srsly, what’s really going on?

I have no answers. I’m not an oracle, darling, just a gossip monger.

As of the writing of this post, American Airlines still appears on Kayak search results though the removal of the airline’s listings has been in effect since August 1–granted, the prices are hidden and you have to click through via Orbitz or cheaptickets.com to get to them, but still. They’re there.

Do you use a travel metasearch site, book directly through an online travel agent or go directly to the airline?

“Comments on blogs inevitably implode, and we all accept it under the belief that ‘open is better!’ Open is not better. Running a blog is like letting a virtuoso play for 90 minutes are Carnegie Hall, and then seconds after their performance you run to the back alley and grab the most inebriated homeless person drag them on stage and ask them what they think of the performance they overheard in the alley. They then take a piss on the stage and say ‘F-you’ to the people who just had a wonderful experience for 90 or 92 minutes. That’s openness for you… how far we’ve come! We’ve put the wisdom of the deranged on the same level as the wisdom of the wise.”

Calacanis is done with blogging. He’s now limiting his interaction to 1,000 of his readers through a mailing list. His first e-mail, sent out on July 12, went over some of the reasons he chose to make the change from a public blog to the more one-to-one kind of exchange that occurs over e-mail: in short, people are assholes.

LET’S GO WITH THE DIGG MODEL AND LET THEM HAVE MOB RULE

Who doesn’t remember the Sarah Lacy interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at SXSWi in March? Before the keynote address was over my Twitter timeline was exploding with cruel and unusual remarks about the journalist. No one is arguing it was a genius interview, or even a decent one—it wasn’t. But it certainly didn’t warrant the response it received, either.

“Try doing what I do for a living,” Lacy told the antagonistic crowd toward the end of the interview, completely exasperated. And so the mob began to scream that she turn the microphone over. Angry, Lacy snapped, “Let’s go with the Digg model and let them have mob rule!”

And what about when blogger and former editor of Gawker, Emily Gould appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine? NYT.com had to temporarily lock the discussion because its moderators were overwhelmed by the number of comments—most of them negative, of course. But the comments were nothing compared to the kind of rage that tore across the blogosphere. Gould was lynched and quartered, web 2.0-style.

When Wired’s latest issue hit the newsstands with blogger and former Star dating columnist Julia Allison on the cover, Gawker titled a piece about it The Backhanded Art of the Unflattering Cover and closed the piece by saying, “More importantly: editors and contributors who perhaps have some doubt as to your value as a cover model may undermine the honor with unflattering photoshop work and coverlines.”

Commenters didn’t waste a second before jumping in: “How do you photoshop someone’s legs into such elongated, hideous oblivion?” and “I love JA’s shoes! Do they come in human sizes?” and “I’d be totally behind that Wired cover if she were on a toilet and there was a pregnancy test in her hand with a pentagram on the indicator.”

And what about the deletion scandal between BoingBoing and San Francisco Chronicle’s sex columnist and Fleshbot contributor Violet Blue? Late last month, Violet Blue noticed that the content that related to her or her work on BoingBoing had disappeared (LA Times Web Scout blog has the number of missing entries at around 72). BoingBoing offered no explanation for the removal of these posts until after the issue exploded in the public square.

When interviewed by LA Times, BoingBiong’s Xeni Jardin, who had edited the one post Violet Blue had written and who had made most of the mentions to the sex blogger in other BoingBoing posts said:

A year and a half ago when I unpublished this stuff, it was a time when there were a couple of hate web sites specifically about me. Kooky, creepy Internet guys were posting all sorts of grotesque, sexually explicit stuff about me, and trying to find photos of my house and information of my family. Really gross stuff that frightened me. When you’re at the receiving end of that kind of attention, would you voluntarily go out with private information in something that just felt sensitive and felt like your private editorial prerogative?

The problem, of course, is that BoingBoing isn’t a personal blog. But this isn’t about what happened there. It’s about what happens to people online.

IT’S MY BLOG, I CAN BITCH IF I WANT TO

The internet makes us easy targets. But not without our help.

Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog, according to BlogWorldExpo. While we know that content we’re putting online is accessible to anyone with an internet connection, it’s almost impossible to resist the urge to overshare.

Most recently, my good friend Katerina received threats from her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend and baby momma after the latter found her blog.

“She wants to get a restraining order to keep me away from her son because of the high sexual content of my blog,” Katerina told me.

“That’s patently ridiculous.” I responded. “If she hadn’t screwed herself by changing her name to something so absolutely generic maybe she could have tried to get you for defamation of character considering everything you’ve said about her. But paint you as a sexual predator? Please, just because she’s frigid and could never fuck her ex like you do!”

People are assholes take #1,342,209. No, not really. But that’s how many hits you get if you look up, “I hate you” on Google Blogs.

Who hasn’t ranted about an ex, an ex’s ex, a colleague, a sibling, a parent, a spouse, a boss, a client, a neighbor, a friend, a foe, the government? A blog is a cache of personal stories and people who piss us off are a real part of life.

And so we blog. Usually, it’s reactionary. Something hurts us, we blog and we let it go. But every once in a while you have the case of someone who can’t let it go. Anger becomes vendetta and they begin to dedicate a significant part of their lives to the destruction of someone they once called a friend.

My friend Atherton Bartelby, a Honolulu-based graphic designer, was BFF with a sport commentatrix based in the East Coast whom we’ll call Jackie. I use the past tense because they no longer talk. In fact, they hate each other. What happened? She was flying him out to the mainland for a get together and he stood her up. He said it was work-related. She said he was too drunk to find the airport.

That was just the beginning. For months, Jackie aired all of Bartelby’s dirty laundry on her blog. I don’t know how much of it was true, but from his taxes to alleged medical conditions, it was all right there, just a Google search away.

It was so messy and shame-attack inducing, Bartelby almost quit blogging. He came back, but like a pariah run out of town, he was forced to start from scratch and set up camp at a completely different blogging platform.

PACK OF HATERS

“Behind every success is a pack of haters,” goes the Lil Beck song, but in the microfame game, success is not required. Behind every blog post and tweet and utter and comment is a pack of haters.

“Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it.” Calacanis wrote in his retirement blog post.

The haters wasted no time responding: “Great news! Twitter will be a much better and less trafficked site now!”, “You had a blog?”, “Wait, you weren’t retired?”

We developed the Gestalt effect as a survival mechanism to visually recognize the whole form of a predator in the wild from an incomplete collection of lines and shapes. Will we in time develop a new mechanism to somehow avoid the frequent acts of random violence that we experience online now?

I remember the first time someone tore me a new one in a comment, completely unprovoked. I don’t remember who it was or what they said, but I will never forget how I felt: it was somewhere between shame and panic. I couldn’t understand it—why would a stranger feel compelled to be so mean to me?

The answer is that they don’t need a reason. The second you put yourself online, you turn yourself into an target.

DON’T READ THE COMMENTS

“You really shouldn’t read the comments,” was the first piece of advice that Emily Gould received when she started working at Gawker, a snarky gossip and entertainment blog about the media.

She disobeyed. It’s hard not to.

“I once received ‘Go back to Toronto!’ as a comment on my shitty editing skills when I turned down a supposedly widely-published author—who also supposedly fucked Bukowski’s sloppy seconds, as if that’s a claim to writing fame!” Laura Roberts, editor of the literary smut magazine Black Heart Magazine tells me.

I can’t see anyone hating on the funny, bodacious Roberts. I begin asking everyone I know with an online presence whether they’ve received mean comments from strangers.

“Yeah,” journalist and former relationship columnist Matt Katz confirms. He’s been blogging for a year about his engagement. “It was from a Malawian living in England. He said, ‘you live in a country where men get shit on their penises and you defend it’ and whatnot. I deleted it.”

Digital girl and media maven Julia Roy linked me to a post on her blog about a troll she contracted via the popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Across her timeline, Roy’s been a dick tease, a dumb bitch, a lying ass bitch, and a “hoe ass.” And, no, I don’t know what that is, either.

“You’ve received your share of nasty comments—what’s the worst?” I ask Emily Gould.

“Ha!” she replies. “Um, at this point it all kind of blurs together.”

THE INTERNET WON’T MAKE UP FOR WHAT HAPPENED IN HIGH SCHOOL

That’s what blogger Meg Fowler’s shirts over at Cafepress say. According to her, it’s a desire to compensate for loserdom experienced in high school that makes people mean online.

Everyone is shot back to the put someone down or be put down mentality that makes high school so brutal. Add anonymity to this equation and the potential for serious assholism is exponential.

“I’m not naive enough to think that anyone will ever wrangle all the assholes into submission and calm the Internet into a state of semi-grace,” says Fowler. But she’s put her two cents out there in an often-Digged post titled How Not To Be An Asshole Or Encourage Assholism On The Internet.

“At the end of the day, everyone will lose their temper now and again, and write something that embarrasses them. It’s just a matter of not making it a lifestyle choice,” she writes. “If you’ve been an asshole, apologize, and let it go. If the person ignores you, you did your part. You can’t make them love you, as Bonnie Raitt says.”

LIFE AFTER WEBSECUTION

“If I were going to completely disavow self-scrutiny and unedited opinion-broadcasting, it would mean the end of my life as a blogger,” wrote Gould in her piece on blogging for the New York Times Magazine. “I still have Emily Magazine as a place to spew when I need to. It will never again be the friendly place that it was in 2004—there are plenty of negative comments now, and I don’t delete them. I still think about closing the door to my online life and locking them out, but then I think of everything else I’d be locking out, and I leave it open.”

As of today, Gould has reinstated comments on her blog after two weeks without that function on her posts. Will her commenters reform and learn to play nice?

Will any of us learn to play nice?

Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and ex-husband to a woman who made a circus of the disintegration of their marriage online, said it best, “Cruelty is a failure of imagination.”

Let’s be more creative.