Terminal Narcissism

Yesterday, New York's Daily Intel offered the following fret about ex-Gawker editor Emily Gould's big cover story in the Sunday Times Magazine - a personal essay about personal lives in the age of blogging, or something like that:

What troubles us about Gould's oncoming article is not that it will be a rehash of everything we've seen before. It's that people will mistake her perspective on the Internet, writing, and fame as the perspective of an entire generation of bloggers. (Much the way, as the Observer noted, Joyce Maynard's essay in the Times Magazine in 1972 seemed to speak for a generation of young women.) In our experience reading her work, she rarely ventures outside of her own head. Hence, not the best representative of a social subclass. Millions of people blog, many of them about themselves. But if past work is anything to judge by, we're not going to be reading about them this weekend. Except for the ones Gould slept with.

They needn't have worried: I seriously doubt that even the least internet-savvy reader will mistake Gould's astonishingly dull non-romp through her deeply trivial travails for the voice of a generation of bloggers. The only question is who comes out of this piece looking worse - Gould herself, or whichever editor thought her limp prose and less-than-riveting love life deserved 7937 words in one of America's best magazines.

Comments

"...one of America's best magazines"?

It's about the level of quality that I'd expect out of that rag.

Posted by Eric Blair | May 22, 2008 5:07 PM

That's about how I felt after I read/skimmed the piece the first time. After I decided I should read the whole thing before torching it, it came out a little better than you're giving it credit for.

That said, I agree that it's hardly worthy of what is usually one of America's best magazines.

Posted by david | May 22, 2008 6:01 PM

I think the term “narcissism” somewhat obscures the distinction between what is and isn’t wrong with this article. Writing about blogging, including autobiographical blogging, is legitimate; this popular new form is different from any previous media outlet, and well-considered observations about personal life are always interesting. I just didn’t think this particular article had a lot to say. But the flaw of this article didn’t relate to its intimate nature, rather to its failure to relate blogging dilemmas to broader controveries about mass media and the celebrity culture, which obviously fascinate large numbers of people and no less clearly embody any number of disturbing qualities. I must say I found The Atlantic’s recent covering-Britney-Spears story similarly unenlightening in that it really failed to explore cultural issues outside its own strange narrative, which I slightly engrossing but mostly unpleasant.

Posted by jason | May 22, 2008 7:43 PM

I thought it was an incredibly dull piece when I stumbled on it this morning and so there was the expected "hunh?" as to how it came to be a giant piece in the Times Magazine; but I am even more baffled now to see it's on the list of most emailed! What!? Seriously?

Posted by Syd | May 23, 2008 1:01 AM

"...one of America's best magazines"?

It also gives space to William Safire for a dull, factually-challenged language column. Every so often someone pops up on some linguistics forum with a question, identifying himself as Safire's research assistant. This invariably provokes incredulity: Safire has a research assistant? The main reason to read him is to play spot-the-errors. For an informative, fact-based language column, we read Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe.

Posted by Richard Hershberger | May 23, 2008 11:26 AM

The bottom line is that people love to hear about the latest ways young women are overemoting and overdramatizing their lives. It has sex appeal. Even when by objective standards it's quite boring, there's the titillating edge of young Manhattan girl having sex! taking drugs!

Posted by mq | May 25, 2008 12:41 AM

I kept reading your comments as "astonishingly non-dull romp" and was seriously concerned for your sanity. Now I'm just worried about my mad reading skillz.

Really, though, who publishes this nonsense?

Posted by Cal | May 26, 2008 12:19 PM