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This past week, I gave a talk at Arse Electronika, the conference about sex and technology and culture with my friend Viviane on blogging, transparency, authenticity and identity. Viviane is my friend I met through reading sex and relationship blogs right after my divorce; once we met in person we became fast friends and use social media, email and the telephone to stay connected.
Our talk, entitled “Avoiding the Emily Gould Effect: Over sharing, Transparency & Blogging” talks about identity and reputation management in a world where many people stream big chunks of their lives—and don’t always anticipate some of the situations that may result—or how their readers may bit back. The presentation—along with annotated links—is going up on SlideShare this week, but I wanted to share some of the notes for an essay I wrote as I worked on the preso.
We live in a world where everyone knows everything. It’s Being There and EdTV for real.
The narrative of our lives is that we are real, and that we package the real in the virtual and ship it out to you. Yep, it’s all about the lifestreaming, just like EdTV.
- Robert Scoble is online 20 hours a day, talking with 20,000 people + as millions listen in.
- Jefferson is the Samuel Pepys of the slut blogosphere, obsessively chronicling every encounter, from just legal coeds to Nubian sex parties to housewives out for a thrill.
- Julia Allison, gossip and relationships writer and TV spot personality, starts life streaming, sharing the very public hassles of her relationship with Jake Lodwick, a controversial start-up millionaire.
These acts of sharing your life in this way support the narrative that our lives are stable, and we’re persons of note. It also supports the assumptions that being interesting will reward us with respect and success--because our lives, our ideas, our friends, and our jokes are so valuable, so compelling.
Just like on reality TV, we don’t have to do anything—we just have to be—only with less nice clothes than Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
Is there any surprise that we’ve become a culture addicted to fame?
And that blogging on the Internet has become, for many people, the cultured and erudite way to achieve the celebrity and recognition garnered by movie stars and cam girls?
And of course, that brings us right home to sex, relationships, blogging and over sharing.
In a culture where celebrity can be bought, and where reality shows rule, ordinary but ambitious people can become micro-famous by virtue of many things—from their bisexuality (Telia Tequila) to their frank authenticity (Robert Scoble & Violet Blue) to their dating, relationship and media ambition (Julia Allison).
But, you know all that, don’t you?
You, the people formerly known as the audience, as Jeff Jarvis has said, are the consumers of their enduring narratives. Bloggers spin the tales, and you consume.
So when, you might ask, does exposure, or transparency, become annoying?
At what point does sharing information about the latest breakup, the sex toy, the current flame, the past flame or the three-some become two much information—either for you, the audience—or for the exhibitionist you are so cheerfully watching?
And when the world hits TMI with the latest blog celebrity smack down, when it is good fun and when it is over sharing?
Sure, it’s tempting to focus on the public breakups, the flame wards, the Team Nicole and Team Paris camps, but it’s more interesting to examine how other writers—bloggers like ourselves—think about and manage their own boundaries as to what they write (and to ask you to think about what your boundaries and personal rules are).
To that end, we asked some of the bloggers we talked about in our preso to answer the following questions:
- Do you feel you're public figure and you need to let everyone what's going on with you, or do you feel you have over shared at times?
- How did you come to the transparency you have?
- Did you feel that you over shared at times? Why or why not? About what? And what did you learn from this/did you change your voice?
- For people who feel they have ended up more of their personal life than they intended, what advice would you give them?
Here are some of the responses we collected (and some relevant items already out in the blogosphere):
