caro:
There’s been a lot of blogger-to-blogger drama on the Internet recently (Baron v. Calacanis, Rambin v. Frangry, what-have-you) and it’s all made me think back to a time when I was 17 and royally pissed off my ice cream store co-worker’s girlfriend on LiveJournal. I’d ranted about how she was suspicious of me being friends with her boyfriend, and how it was so unfair that girlfriends assumed guys couldn’t just be friends with girls, and blah blah blah. As I recall, she proceeded to flood the comments section of the post with hate messages from her friends.
(Don’t bother searching for it. It was locked up years ago. But Maria probably knows the incident in question, and katiebakes has inevitably visited the establishment where all this wild teenage drama went down.)
The fact of the matter is, once I was even a year or two older I wouldn’t have wanted to air that sort of grievance on the Web, no matter how convinced I was that the girlfriend in question wouldn’t find it. (She did.) Oversharing the details of your life (Gyno exams! PMS! Grocery lists! Penis lengths!) is one thing; actively carrying out feuds for all to see is a whole different can of Sour Patch gummi worms.
So anyway, now we have this missive. I’d prefer not to make a judgment call on either side because I don’t know Chaya and only know Nick through work, I don’t know exactly what happened, and obviously this deals with an extremely sensitive matter that I hope the two of them can resolve with minimal pain and angst. But look at how it all unfolded! Plurk? Twitter direct messages? Tumblr? Gchat? Things were so much simpler when all we had were AIM and LiveJournal.
Just reading these things makes me feel awkward, as though I’ve inadvertently listened in on a phone call or read someone’s personal e-mails. But clearly there was an active choice in making something so deeply personal available to the public, whether it’s a cry for help or a call for attention or even an attempt to get the Interwebs to take sides.
I’m sorry. It’s just that Tumblr has started to feel like a middle school cafeteria as of late. Remember when you were at a pre-self-consciousness age and were willing to say just about anything about anyone without concern for the consequences? Apparently that just doesn’t go away now.
Gallery Carre
