The internet has improved our lives by bringing information to the public. Even once-sacred mysteries are readily accessible via the Online Catholic Encyclopedia. Few today are safe from search engines, though some are considerably more Googleicious than others.

(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.

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“Why should we all build our homes and give residence to the trolls under them?” asks Jason Calacanis in his first e-mail after retiring from blogging.

“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.

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