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Emily Gould lay panting for breath on a bathroom floor in the throes of a panic attack. It was as if she could hear millions of voices, but they were not inside her head. Instead, her defences were overwhelmed by a frenzy of blogging, narcissism and sniping from the worldwide web.
Gould was a star blogger with a glamorous career as a gossip journalist on the New York party circuit. Her job at a must-read website opened doors that old-school hacks had had slammed in their faces. Yet the blog that gave Gould such power would also burn her.
"I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I'd have to destroy the entire internet," Gould writes.
"If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress ... I prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I'd ever made."
Gould, 26, has written a mea culpa of some 8000 words, not in an epic blog but in an article in the most recent New York Times magazine. In it, she tells how, in her first tentative forays online, she crossed from the private to public sphere and found it impossible to turn back. Blogging caused a split from her live-in boyfriend and led to a disastrous appearance on national television. The experience left her struggling to breathe.
Hers is a cautionary tale in an era when it is possible to boast about sexual indiscretions, confess heartbreak or depression, or exact revenge against ex-lovers to a worldwide audience.
The medium of blogging is 11 years old. The first, written by New Yorker Dave Winer in April 1997, began with just four words: "Check this out. Amazing!"
The desire to self-publish and promote has spilled over on to the profile pages of social networking sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace. Some bloggers have even signed lucrative book deals.
Gould has not been alone in pausing at the keyboard for a period of soul searching. Another enthusiast, Tracie Egan, has written frankly about her love life on her blog, One D at a Time.
It was a harmless pastime until she revealed her identity. "When the people in my life knew [our interactions] were potential fodder for [my writing], things changed. I began getting requests like, 'Please, please don't write about this'," she posted recently.
Zoe Margolis used a pseudonym to chronicle her sexual adventures on Girl With a One Track Mind but was "outed" by a national newspaper.
Margolis said last week: "There still seems a long way to go before people grasp how revealing so much personal detail about themselves can have a permanent impact."
The backlash started in earnest last year when Andrew Keen, a former dotcom entrepreneur, published Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, an attack on what he sees as a noisy crowd with little of interest to say. He has now attacked the Times for publishing Gould's "naked manifestation of digital narcissism".
Jeff Jarvis, a New York-based blogger and new media academic, said: "We all can speak in blogs and be found via Google and stay connected in Facebook. This is our identity. Like anything else, this 'publicness' can be misused and abused. But I argue that the benefits of this will outweigh the negatives. The internet is making us more social. And our mutually assured humiliation may make us more forgiving."
At first, Gould's blogging habit was occasional and controllable. Her first blog, Emily Magazine, was read by a few hundred people, but it still angered her boyfriend Henry when she wrote about him. In 2006, Gould was headhunted by Gawker, the fashionable Manhattan media gossip blog founded by British journalist Nick Denton.
Gould revelled in the attention she got from readers and gradually disclosed details of her personal life to encourage more. Soon this high, with its diminishing returns, became like a drug.
Her position led to an appearance on Larry King Live, CNN's flagship talk show. On it she was grilled by comedian Jimmy Kimmel over Gawker's "celebrity stalker map", in which readers emailed in sightings of celebrities. By her own admission, Gould failed to give a convincing defence. After the programme, she logged on to her Gawker email account and found her inbox flooded with hundreds of angry missives. One said: "You looked like a little girl in awe of your surroundings."
Another chided: "I just want to tell you how uneducated and stupid you came off. You truly are a cheap, heartless human being."
The clip of Gould's performance appeared on Yahoo!'s front page. A reporter called her parents. She realised "by going on TV and having a daily blog in front of thousands, I had put myself in the category of 'people who make their livings in public', and so, by my own values, I was an appropriate target.
"But that didn't mean I could handle it. A week later, I found myself lying on the floor of the bathroom, felled by a panic attack. I started having breathless bouts of terror that left me feeling drained and hopeless."
She left Henry for a Gawker colleague, Josh. She created a blog called Heartbreak Soup in which she wrote caustically about her sex life and her despair when she found Josh had a girlfriend.
Eventually, she became burned out and blogged out. She resigned from Gawker and "lost the will to blog".
But it was too late. Josh wrote an article about her for the New York Post, claiming he felt violated by Heartbreak Soup. Gould recalls: "I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the foetal position. I didn't want to exist." She was tempted to use her blog to strike back at Josh, but stopped herself.
Although she does not claim to be an entirely reformed blogger, she appears to have learned a lesson: "Lately, online, I've found myself doing something unexpected: keeping the personal details of my current life to myself."
GOING PUBLIC
13 million Number of blogs tracked by monitoring site Technorati (thought not to include 73 million Chinese blogs).
One Blog at least is created every second.
- OBSERVER
