Blogs are such a powerful medium that it's a shame their rise coincides
with the prolonged adolescence of a self-centered generation.

Think
about it: For the first time in history, anyone with a relatively
inexpensive machine can share his or her thoughts with the whole world.
Some people are using this valuable tool to break news, share their enthusiams, or influence public opinion.
But too many bloggers, especially those under 30, mostly write about
themselves – a subject with which they seem inordinately fascinated.

A
few years ago, I was at a bar listening to a younger friend argue with
some of her friends about something that one of them had written in the
comments section on one of their blogs. When my eyes started to glaze
over, she asked me why I didn't have a personal blog – by which she
meant a space for the quotidian details of my life, not a forum like
this one, where I sometimes write about my life but only to make a
point about something else. I said that, from what I could tell, not
that many people were all that interested in my life and those who were
could easily call or e-mail me. She found this shocking: Wasn't my
life, she seemed to wonder, as utterly fascinating as her own?

It
was – which is to say, not at all. While I hope people I don't know
personally are interested in stories I write, I would never kid myself
into thinking that they're actually interested in me.

This weekend, The New York Times Magazine ran a story by the blogger Emily Gould about how she grew addicted to oversharing on the Internet. She worked for Gawker,
and the story dutifully recounts her time there. But the focus of the
story is about how she put her personal life online for anyone to see –
her job troubles, her romantic life, everything. According to the
story, she was chastened by all of the negative attention she received.

Of course, writing a story about one's life for the Times
could be a form of oversharing in itself. Gould is a talented writer,
wry and incisive. Unfortunately, however, her main subject is herself.
In allowing her to drone on, the Times offers an excellent
picture of how today's twenty-somethings relate to the Internet. But I
don't think it's a very flattering portrait.

Incidentally, neither do many of the paper's readers. The story has drawn well over a thousand comments, many of which seem to say, "Don't you have anything better to write about?"

It's an excellent question.

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