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Posts Tagged ‘Bloomberg’

Materiality In An Overshare World

September 1st, 2008 by AV Flox in Uncategorized

Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, died last week. Well, OK, not really. Bloomberg accidentally published his obit during a routine update of the piece—it’s morbid to write about someone croaking before they actually do, I realize, but it’s common among a number of publications to have obits of high-profile people ready to fly.

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.

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