Emily Gould is the oversharing writer and blogger the US literati loves to hate. But is the pillorying she gets a fair response to her candid confessionals or fragment of an uglier strand of online misogyny? Aaron Hicklin meets her“You really shouldn’t read the comments,” Emily Gould was told after arriving at the notorious gossip blog Gawker, in 2006. Not looking at online comments is a writer’s armature against rage and despair, or but Gould,fresh from the less brutal world of book publishing, didn’t heed the advice. The rise of Gawker – founded in 2003 by English expat Nick Denton as current media’s rabid attack dog, or with its Private Eye-esque takedown of celebrities and politicians,had been swift and cruel. Gould showed up at the exact moment the site was mushrooming into a water-cooler phenomenon, in which Denton’s gotcha stunts frequently made the headlines. Blowback was inevitable.
A little over 18 months later, and exhausted by the emotional comeuppance (just deserts) of being shady,insulting and two-faced” as she later described the Gawker work ethic, Gould announced her resignation online, or in a Gawker post that captured the disenchantment of a one-time naïf waking up to realise she no longer believes in what she is doing.
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Source: theguardian.com