Emily Gould, me and blogging

By John Cheeran
Reading Emily Gould’s Exposed in the New York Times Magazine was an experience for me. I have been a regular blogger, but rarely have I posted on my personal life. One thing is that I post revealing my real identity. And who the hell is interested in me?
But Emily has been a trendsetter, I guess. I may not be far from the truth when I write that Emily has given rise to pathetic imitators in India, such as Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, who has been pasting her real life (and imagined too) online to grab some attention and page views.
Why do I blog?
Blog gives me the freedom (as far as Google lets it) to write what I want and what I feel without having to please anyone else. But it has been a deliberate decision not to get overtly personal. Many may quickly point out that being a man I stand no chance even if I had gone the Emily Gould way.
Well, each one has his /her own way and apparently Emily has had her way what with NYT dedicating its last Sunday’s magazine cover for her. But I like the way Emily writes. It was an absolute delight to read her essay on what many had described as ‘modern love’.
Please allow me to quote Emily from her essay in NYT magazine.
“The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.”
And let me add this bit from New York Magazine on www.gawker.com and the kind of journalism Emily has revelled in.

“Journalists are both haves and have-nots. They’re at the feast, but know they don’t really belong—they’re fighting for table scraps, essentially—and it could all fall apart at any moment. Success is not solid. That’s part of the weird fascination with Gawker, part of why it still works, five years on—it’s about the anxiety and class rage of New York’s creative underclass. Gawker’s social policing and snipe-trading sideshow has been impossible to resist as a kind of moral drama about who deserves success and who doesn’t. It supplies a Manhattan version of social justice.”