International Law

A life exposed

The cover story for this Sunday's Times Magazine, is an insightful and poignant piece by Emily Gould looking at the consequences of exposing her life - and the lives of those around her - in her blog Emily Magazine:

Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I?d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.

Some of my blog?s readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren?t acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me e-mail. They criticized me sometimes, but kindly, the way you chide someone you know well. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable.

...

I understand that by writing here about how I revealed my intimate life online, I?ve now revealed even more about what happened during the period when I was most exposed. Well, I?m an oversharer ? it?s not like I?m entirely reformed. But lately, online, I?ve found myself doing something unexpected: keeping the personal details of my current life to myself. This doesn?t make me feel stifled so much as it makes me feel protected, as if my thoughts might actually be worth honing rather than spewing. But 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.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on May 23, 2008 (boomark / email).