“Deep down, all insecure sluts just want to be loved.”

It’s not the kind of response you’d imagine a bride-to-be would receive after announcing her engagement, but that’s exactly what Jezebel’s Tracie Egan got after she posted about her coming nuptials earlier this month.

“I can’t imagine having the time on my hands to obsess about someone I claim to hate, follow their writing and then going out of my way to try to make them feel bad,” she wrote in her blog this week.

Few people can, though you’d think that with all the stuff that’s constantly going on in this fast-paced place we call the World Wide Web, that most of us would be too busy to waste time being discourteous to other people.

Wrong.

“The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness,” Amy Harmon wrote in the New York Times four years ago. “Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented—and often unintentional—degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent’s lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills.”

But these aren’t adolescents we’re talking about here. They’re adults and even though the web isn’t as wild as it used to be, we’re still acting without any sense.

My good friend Atherton Bartelby is the one who turned me on to Time Out New York columnist and former Star editor-at-large Julia Allison. Allison, who gained celebrity online thanks largely to media blog Gawker, is a central figure in the microcelebrity wave and a frequent target of random reader hatred.

I got to see the metamorphosis happen first-hand and I still don’t know what happened. Atherton absolutely loved her columns up until some point over the summer, when he became cross with her over nothing in particular and started railing about everything she did with the fire of a thousand trolls.

Neither he nor I know Allison personally (she and I exchanged a couple of e-mails in June and I think may have I freaked her out with a rant about love and Stendhal), but she was so often a topic of Atherton’s rants that he and I actually had a fight about her.

“Why are you so angry?” I asked him one day over the phone, following a tirade about how reading about her at some tech event was giving him angina. “Julia is so pop! Andy Warhol is giggling from the other side. I think you’re jealous.”

He didn’t hang up on me, but I know he wanted to.

Ultimately, we have power over what we read. We can choose to spend our day reading content that inspires and informs us or waste it on blogs we don’t enjoy.

Personally, I don’t think there are any bad bloggers out there. There are bloggers I love and bloggers into whose target demographic I don’t fit. It doesn’t mean they suck, it just means they’re not for me. So I don’t read them. Simple, right?

“Dude, just stop reading her blog.”

But he couldn’t.

Dear Emily Post Institute,

I’m greatly enjoying your latest edition of Etiquette and thank you for the time you have put into making available an updated version of such a helpful guide. I must admit, however, that I find the chapter on electronic communication a little lacking. Seeing as most of our interaction in this day and age occurs on the web, I strongly recommend future editions give more space to this matter.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sincerely,
AV Flox

In August, Wired ran a story about internet fame featuring Julia Allison. The article, which was part of Wired’s How-To issue, gave tips for aspiring fameballs: seek photo ops with high-profile people, dress to draw attention, keep your readers guessing, let your minions fight your battles, and be a hot woman with an exhibitionist streak.

It was a fun, light-hearted piece. Most readers hated it.

“Wired is supposed to be a legitimate source for all things technology,” wrote a reader identifying himself as Tomcore, “and helping further propagate a wannabe-celebutant—clarification—wannabe ROFLcon celebutant like Julie [sic] Allison, discredits the source. Don’t waste your time or ours doing reporting on insignificant attention hungry parasites. They’re everywhere and hardly worthy a Wired cover. Or at least if you do—make it someone entertaining—like the Starwars Kid.”

The rest of the web wasn’t far behind. At Valleywag, where Melissa Gira Grant had written a piece on the subject, a commenter whined, “I just cancelled my Wired subscription because of this Julia crap. I’m sorry but she is not a geek, not news worthy, not VC funding worthy. She is a high maintanence [sic] attention whore making a mockery of the industry. There are so many women they could have put on that cover that are intelligent geeks but instead they chose her. It is completely wrong and Wired should be ashamed of themselves for falling for her bullshit.”

At Gawker, the blog that’d made her famous, commenters were busy discussing how badly Photoshopped her legs looked. And on this month’s Wired, a reader graced the Rants section with the following jab, “She’s not worth the pixels she demands on our screens, and if I could find a way to blame her for the current mortgage crisis, I would.”

Last week Atherton published a piece featuring the ten most charming and often overlooked places in Hawaii. The piece, which was a final tribute to his time on the islands, took him days. He was so excited, he actually IMd me a link as soon as he wrapped up.

Not even a day later, an anonymous commenter hit his blog: “I find it interesting that on this list of must-dos almost none of the photographs are yours… surely in ten years you’ve actually ‘done’ these places at least once, enough to snap a pic or at least give us something more personal about your recommendation. Fairly or not, this leads one to believe that your recommendations are based not from personal experience but rather a spastic and deliberately obscure aggregation of ‘bests’ from travel blogs or hiking trail sites.”

While we build better blogs with criticism than we do with fawning praise, I’m disappointed that someone would take the time to reply to a carefully put-together blog post simply to scold the writer for not using his own images, insinuate he has never visited any of the specified locations, and attack him for being “deliberately obscure”—isn’t the whole point of the post to bring to light the lesser known wonders of the islands?

I don’t disagree that seeing these places through the blogger’s eyes would have been more interesting, however unprofessional or blurry the picture. A constructive suggestion would have been, “I know a lot of people don’t carry cameras when they hike and if they do, don’t always take the best photos, but this post would have been better if you had shared what you saw of these locations that touched you so deeply, even if they aren’t professional quality.”

There’s an immense difference between helpful critique and hurtful criticism. Critique may not always be easy to take, but those offering it do it with the objective of helping those whose content they enjoy to develop even better content. We do it with firm words but never lose sight of the effort the creators of the content have put forth.

“When you’re a victim of a personal attack online, the first thing to remember is this: It’s extremely difficult to put yourself out there on the web, but it’s supremely easy to critique or mock others who do,” wrote Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani a couple of years ago.

Her comments are something that will always stay with me because of how simple and true they are. It’s not easy to put your thoughts and experience out into the world, especially in a culture that believes that they have the right to destroy everything that isn’t hidden or somehow protected.

“Would you graffiti a car in the street just because it wasn’t parked inside a garage?” I asked a friend once.

“That analogy doesn’t even make sense,” she responded. “The car belongs to someone.”

“So do the words used to represent the thoughts this person is expressing. So does that blog. The internet is a space and a post is a person’s property. And by leaving a vicious and useless anonymous comment, you’re vandalizing it.”

She didn’t respond.

“The web is crawling with overcaffeinated surfers who have been staring at a glowing box for hours—not the ideal environment for human interaction,” Trapani explained in her Lifehacker piece. “It’s easy to take out frustrations on someone online because they don’t quite feel real. Talking smack puts people in a position of power, one they want to be in because they feel small and weak in other areas of their lives. The key words here are ‘small’ and ‘weak.’”

“I’m really glad it happened,” Atherton told me the following day over coffee. “It’s helped me appreciate Julia Allison on a whole other level.”

Just then an e-mail tumbled into my inbox directly from my blog’s contact page: “Your piece about Philip Noble [sic] is insulting. First Nick Douglas and now this? You’re a male apologist and a cheap male-pleaser and you need to have your va-jay-jay card revoked.”

The e-mail address the commenter had included is telling “not@telling.com”. If a commenter can’t even include a working e-mail address or URL, he is a coward who lacks the courage of his convictions and isn’t worth another thought.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s OK to disagree with people, but always ask yourself if you have something to bring to the table. Personal attacks and assumptions about the people who have expressed their views before you are not valid arguments for anything. If you’re so enraged by what you read that you can’t function, then don’t try! Offending others will not make them more likely to listen to you. In fact, it often has the exact opposite effect.

It’s not that difficult to present an opposing viewpoint in a constructive way. Just follow the rule of the Cs: be civil, clear, concise and constructive. Build, don’t break.

I can’t imagine anyone calling me a misogynist to my face, and neither can I see anyone walking up to Egan and calling her an insecure slut.

In a web 2.0 world, I think we need to change the old saying, “if you can’t say something nice” to “if you wouldn’t say it to my face, then don’t say anything at all.”

If you still can’t play nice, then, to quote Egan, “FAQ you.”

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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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