Because 2008 isn’t just the summer of expensive corn and Obama-rama, it’s also the summer of TMI. Over-sharing has become a form of communication for our generation; from blogging about bad dates, to blogging about our self-indulgent issues, to blogging purely to become famous. No matter who we are, we can become stars overnight by uploading naked photos, name-dropping about a wild party, or simply having an ounce of literary ability and a snarky way with words.

By late July, 2008, the percent of people in the US who haven’t seen a celebrity vajayjay flash or heard someone say, “dude, I’m gonna blog about this!” is monumentally small, and it seems like every day a new gossip or 24 hour news site pops up. However, amidst the clattering of fingers on keyboards and snapping of flashbulbs, I can’t help but wonder if this constant need to be seen and heard is actually doing us any good.

Is all this over-sharing about our drug, drink, and sexual exploits really helping women cultivate a strong, intelligent persona? Do we feel more empowered now that Britney, Lindsay, and Paris have made trashy the new black? Are our lives more complete now that we know what David Beckham had for breakfast?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. As a twenty-something myself, I really want to know:

In this age of over-sharing, are you confident about yourself and your image? Are you proud of how we as women have represented ourselves in the media?

Vote in our poll, and write in our comments — this is your chance to tell the world exactly how you feel.

Don’t worry. You will. And soon.

The New York Times Magazine is running a cover piece by Gould this Sunday. It’s ostensibly about “the dangers of oversharing on the Internet,” and is actually the culmination of a breakup sadder and less significant than anyone could possibly imagine. The story goes like this:

Josh blogged. Emily blogged. They blogged together on Gawker. They screwed. She blogged about them screwing. He read her blog about them screwing. He wrote an article about her blogging about them screwing. She wrote an article about his article about her blogging about them screwing. Gawker blogged about her article about his article about her blogging about them screwing, and so the whole universe devoured

itself, as in the end of Southland Tales when the two Seann William Scotts finally meet, thereby creating a rift in the time/space continuum.

This, by the way, is why my boyfriend is not allowed to read CollegeCandy.

I am not shy about using my intimate life as fodder for my blogs. I will tell you which vibrator I use, what kind of birth control I prefer, how I deal with breakups (hint: drinking), which arguments I’ve had recently and why, who I’ve slept with, and what I’ve regretted about those experiences. I like to think that I’m not the focus of these pieces, and that I only incorporate personal anecdotes when they serve to illustrate some larger, more important point. I also don’t use real names, because I am not an insane person. Nevertheless, if you know me, you know who I’m writing about, and you know why.

Of course, I’ve gotten myself into trouble. Back in the days of LiveJournal, I wrote that my best friend’s boyfriend “lied a lot.” I was not invited to their house for several months. (To be fair, he said that he had been an astronaut; this claim has never beensubstantiated by NASA.) More recently, an ex learned about my pregnancy scare via CC; he e-mailed me to say that he would “never read my blog again” and informed me that I had “wrecked his image of me.” His image of me, apparently, included a womb barren and untouched by man; what this says about him, or me, is open for debate.

We don’t even need to talk about the time that I inadvertently placed my diary on the “shared files” portion of my hard drive, thereby making it accessible to everyone on my college campus. Do we?

Okay, we do: I transferred three months later. Some wounds just don’t heal.

As I’ve come to know more writers, I’ve realized that I, too, am blog material. For those who have never found an unflattering description of their dating choices online (or read the pursuant “right on!!!” comments), let me assure you: it is a harsh realm. Yet it’s only fair — and, to be honest, no more than I (or Emily Gould) ought to expect.

“My only advantage as a reporter,” Joan Didion wrote, in 1968, “is that… people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling someone out.”

That, really, is the point — the point of Josh and Emily, of me and my (nameless) boyfriend, of everyone who writes and lives and writes about living, on the Internet or in print. Relationships are a delicate balance of listening and speaking, revealing yourself and helping the other person feel safe enough to be revealed. Writing is about laying your mind bare, relentlessly, without regard for the people who might dump you or yell at you or hold you in contempt. Being a writer, or dating one, is a paradox. You have to establish trust and intimacy while simultaneously acknowledging that, if an incident makes for good material, it may very well become public knowledge in the near future.

So, yeah: my boyfriend doesn’t read CollegeCandy. There is no way in hell that he’s going to hear about my drinking binges or bad hookups or the fact that I repeatedly and insistently compared an ex to Kevin Federline (with image links!) before I am ready to tell him. I may, however, e-mail him this piece before I post it.

He writes. He might understand.

So who is this Mr. Gessen anyway? Who cares? Mr. Gessen is a M.F.A. drop out from Syracuse University, and the editor for N + 1. As a literary magazine N + 1 exposes all the hackneyed writers of the world. Yippee. Gawker.com mockingly describes it as the “most important literary magazine of our time.” N + 1 sees itself as such, i.e. “mind blowingly intellectual,” and Gawker simply can’t help but invert such a problematic claim. Gessen’s personality, as well as this literary magazine, is throwing a wrench into my earlier comments that relate to Mr. Neyfakh’s article about Ms. Crosley’s supposedly fresh presence in the New York literary scene.

Suffice to say, Gawker’s staff writers are not particularly fond of Mr. Gessen. They have written a series of rancorous pieces (see here, as well as here, here, and finally here) that shred Mr. Gessen’s self-fashioned identity as a leading American intellectual and novelist. Since I am a fan of Gawker, and identify (for the most part) with their snarky tone and “showing things for what they really are” type of journalism, these pieces against Gessen are insightful as well as depressing.

[There’s a romantic back story to the first piece I referenced. If you’re interested in learning more about it, go scout out the countless pieces on Gawker about Emily Gould, an alumna of Gawker, and her previous relationship to Gessen. I won’t go into that stuff here]

So what how does Mr. Gessen relate to a piece about Ms. Crosley? The answer is simple: Based upon the evidence I’ve culled from Gawker, Crosley is obviously cooler than Gessen. What are the most telling pieces of evidence? EXHIBIT A, which came from Mr. Gessen’s own mouth; he confessed to checking his Amazon.com sales obsessively, and expressed frustration when he found that most of the visitors weren’t buying his book, but Crosley’s book instead. That raises another question: why is this guy so (publicly) insecure? I mean, really. It’s not like his book has been shredded by all worthy critics.

If a literary giant such as Joyce Carol Oates gives your novel an outstanding review, why would you think of admitting this secret to anyone as a writer? I don’t care if you’re confiding in your most best-est friend, your beloved wife/husband, your most trusted lover(s), a writer with any sense of dignity would never admit something like that. Hell, for that matter, any self-respecting author wouldn’t check their numbers on Amazon against another author just to determine the worthiness of their book – that’s pretty sad if you ask me.

Gawker isn’t the only place where you’ll find that Mr. Gessen is unpopular. As I mentioned, he’s drawing fire from a lot of different sources. As one critic wrote, “Mr. Gessen’s novel is an extended dark joke on his literary career.” EXHIBIT B: Mr. Gessen thinks he’s cooler and smarter than everybody else. It seems that Mr. Gessen is bent on making a name for himself by ridiculing other writers. (Ms. Crosley wouldn’t dare do such a thing, as she’s obviously too cute and funny to bother). In an effort to reclaim intellectualism and literature, Mr. Gessen and all his sad literary pals at N + 1 have checked humor, and all those delightful things related to levity, at the door. Put simply: Mr. Gessen takes himself too seriously.

In so doing, he’s a vulnerable target, and it’s no fault but his own. (If I were having a coffee with Mr. Gessen, I’d let him know that a mixture of heaviness and levity are a good thing, and that it sounds like he’s gone off the deep end, taken Nietzsche’s Z too seriously, and is stuck in a abyss at the moment. Valleys AND peaks are a good thing, Mr. Gessen). This is yet another piece of evidence for why I think it’s patently obvious that Ms. Crosley is a cooler cat than Mr. Gessen.

The way Mr. Gessen is described by his critics (and apparently even some of his fans) brings me back to the inspiration of this piece – NYC’s self-important, stuck-up, exclusive literary circles. He exudes that snobbish ennui that I find most despicable about literary circles. When I see them in that light, I start to think that Mr. Neyfakh has a point, and then I begin to feel grim. When I feel grim, I turn inward, and ponder the varying levels of Loserdom in our universe. Who likes doing that, Mr. Gessen? Why must you prove what I wish to be untrue about the publishing world of NYC? Before I delve into why I’m loser and how it relates to Ms. Crosley and Mr. Gessen, I need to take another break.

TO BE CONTINUED…