Thursday, May 22, 2008

Overthinking

Non-baseball, but some people may find this interesting: Here's Emily Gould's way, way too long and way, way, too narcissistic account of what it was like to blog for Gawker and then not blog for Gawker anymore, all the while screwing up her personal life and becoming the target of Jimmy Kimmel of all people:

The commenters at Emily Magazine had been like friends. Now, with Gawker’s readers, I was having a different kind of relationship. It wasn’t quite friendship. It was almost something deeper. They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations. They were the voices in my head. They could be ignored sometimes. Or, if I let them, they could become my whole world . . .

. . . when talking about how immersed I became in my online life, I’m tempted to use [the language of addiction] because it provides such handy metaphors. It’s easy to compare the initial thrill of evoking an immediate response to a blog post to the rush of getting high, and the diminishing thrills to the process of becoming inured to a drug’s effects. The metaphor is so exact, in fact, that maybe it isn’t a metaphor at all.

I'll admit that the article -- all ten pages of it, so consider this a warning -- was interesting in a voyeuristic way. And of course I have some professional courtesy about what other bloggers think about the blogging game. But man, some people make things way too complicated.

Wake up. Blog. Shower. Work. Blog. Play with kids. Eat. Spend evening with wife. Blog. Sleep. Repeat five times and then enjoy yourself on the weekend.

What's so hard about this?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's getting to be too much on blogging here. Not why we show up.

Craig Calcaterra said...

Fair enough. I'm not going to stop, necessarily, but yeah, there's been a lot in a short period of time, so I'll try to ration it better.

Mr Lomez said...

But what percentage of your readers themselves write blogs, 50%? There's enough other content on here that i don't think you need to worry about "losing focus", Mr. Shyster.

As for the article, I think the writer's complications in regards to blogging are tantamount to complications in regards to any obsession. The exact same article could've been written by a young trial lawyer who becomes too caught up in his job, no? And you might even offer him the exact same advice.

I am resistant to this idea that blogging is an entirely unique phenomenon. I don't think it is.