Last spring, in the middle of my Offbeat Bride book tour, I was struck by an idea for my second book. It was an awesome idea. My agent was excited about it. I was passionate about it.

I wrote up the first section of a book proposal, and then dove into writing the introduction and them my sample chapters. And then life caught up with me and I realized that I was exhausted and burnt out and dealing with health issues and that I just couldn’t do it.

But as I sat down tonight to get ready to write my next book pitch, I opened up my proposal from last spring and got sad because dammit I want to read this fucking book! But first someone has to write it! And it’s not going to be me.

Therefore, I’ve decided to share the pitch because someone needs to write it. Maybe you?

Oversharing:
Adventures in Confessional Culture

Proposal for a book by Ariel Meadow Stallings

Length: 250 pages

Delivery: 5/2008

c/o Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency

I. I have something I want to tell you.

I have always been my family’s biggest oversharer, blogging about everything from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to career fumbles online since 2000. I took my confessions step further when I exposed my husband, parents, and in-laws in a published memoir about wedding planning. When I apply for jobs, my potential employers can Google me and flip through thousands of my personal photos online, or browse seven years of rambling blog posts about everything from intestinal cleanses to my dead junkie ex-boyfriend to my obsession with hula hooping. Anyone who cares to can surf a listing of what music I’ve been listening to on my computer, even seeing it update live as my music plays. You could stalk me through my hometown of Seattle by following my posts to mobile social networking services like Dodgeball and Twitter.com.

My life is an open book, and you’re all willing to read it. I live transparently and have always thought that the world would be a better place if more people did likewise. I am an transparency advocate, taking my dedication into boardrooms where I evangelize the power of blogs for businesses. No secrets! Oversharing is my way of life.

Then my 18-year-old cousin signed up for Facebook, one of the most popular social networking websites for college students. He started a group called “Red Hot Psychonauts,” his digital ode to his and his friends’ collegiate drug experiences. I stumbled across the group when I was looking at his profile, and spent a few minutes reading through his adorable mushroom trip poetry — A lost boy anticipating the immitating of the forest dwelling shaman. He walks into the sky with the help of earths elevation. Weaving through the mystic tunnels of acient sages. Longing to tiptoe under the bodi tree for a whisper of enlightenment.

It was all pretty cute and harmless, really … the stoned musings of a college kid expanding his mind in the ways of so many longhaired 18 freshmen before him. But then I got to the public posts where he and a friend in Canada started planning a meet-up/mind expansion, including discussions who would carry which illicit recreational substances across the border.

Suddenly, my fiendish dedication to transparency went oddly opaque. Suddnely, I was the prudish privacy hound gasping with one hand over my mouth. I was the semi-hysterical mother freaking out over her 13-year-old’s MySpace page. I sat shame-faced as I typed out an email to my cousin saying, “I totally hate to be the old lady buzz kill, and I don’t care if you do drugs, but since the group is public anyone who wants to can see what y’all are talking about in there … you might want to make it invite only or something? I totally don’t mean to make you paranoid or anything, I just know from personal experience that it SUCKS when someone you don’t want knowing about that stuff finds out about it online.”

It was uncomfortable and confusing to find myself standing on the other side of the “too much information” divide. But there I was, concerned over the possibility that my cousin might find himself in trouble with the law — or at the very least, his mother, who of course has just as much access to Facebook as anyone else. My experience was hardly unique: as panicking headlines shout daily (Utah Mom Finds ‘Pedophile Safe Haven’ On Internet!), there’s a growing panic over the levels of intimacy and transparency that have become increasingly commonplace in our culture.

Teenagers track every detail of their break-ups on MySpace, one week gushing “I love my girlfriend AMY” and a week later proclaiming “I hate my stupid bitch ex girlfriend.” 30something geeks videotape themselves dancing around their living rooms, or livecast a 24/7 video stream using websites like justinTV or Ustream.com. Mothers across the United States use their blogs track the ups and downs of their postpartum depression and the contents of their children’s diapers — all while collecting advertising revenue.

But I’m not just talking about the web, here. In an era of heavily packaged, edited, and filtered mainstream media (”reality television” really isn’t, and we all know it), Americans hungry for a level of authenticity turn to each other and confess in any medium they can find. We share their teen confessionals aloud at nationwide reading events with names like “Mortified” and “Cringe” and “What’s Your Damage.” We write bestselling memoirs that shock and embarrass family members. We playwrite stage shows about how we contracted AIDS, record radio segments about our estranged fathers, and talk to anyone on the street about our depression medication.


While certainly personal artwork and writing have always been a component of culture, the emergence of confessional culture in part reflects a generational shift — raised on “The Real World” and used to being monitored where ever they go, my cousin’s generation seems comfortable sharing every facet of their lives with a candor and baldness that make their parents and even older siblings wince. (”I masturbated twice today,” one user confesses on a site called grouphug.org) But the so-called “Millennials” aren’t the only ones oversharing. With memoir eclipsing its print genre siblings, authors off all ages exorcise their sins by confession their childhood dramas, alcoholism, and adoration of anal sex.

I am both an active participant in and enabler of oversharing. A compulsive confessor (”Hey, guys — I once accidently pooped in a friend’s front yard!”) In addition to seven years of blogging and my wedding memoir, I organize a chronically sold-out Seattle event called the Salon of Shame, where people to stand up and read their worst adolescent poetry while we all laugh at them. I worked for a dotcom that encourage jobseekers to publicly share their personal experiences with employers. I make full use of websites that are part of a so-called “narcissystem” — services like Twitter.com that can be used to broadcast your feelings, thoughts, and even physical locations.

Why do I do this? Why do we do this? Why did Time magazine name me (and you, and YOU) person of the year in 2006? Because they know so much about us, because we’ve shared it all. Big Brother’s got nothing on me compared to what I’ve willingly confessed to almost anyone willing to listen. But where do you draw the line? What pieces do you keep for yourself?


II.

It seems like everyone these days is either a chronic oversharer, or knows one. With an estimated 57 million blogs online (imagine every single resident of New York and Los Angeles writing a weblog — then double it), it’s clear that the web has opened up the floodgates of confession. While blogs are typically the fodder of the under-30 set (current estimates are that 90% of bloggers are in their teens or 20s), growing numbers of 30-something “mommybloggers” have established their corner of the web as the place to tell all about their child-raising endeavors — begging the question, what will their children think of having their sins confessed? What’s the age of consent for oversharing?

Then there’s the issue of ownership. MySpace, the web’s social networking zeitgeist, boasts more than 100 million users, almost all of whom post pictures and personal information about themselves on their profile pages, and many of whom use the website’s built in blogging platform to share even more. YouTube, the incredibly popular video streaming site, has 65,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours, and the site features millions of video diary entries from thousands of users. YouTube was purchased in 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google’s stock, while MySpace (and all its user-generated content) was purchased in 2005 for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. This is big money. You have to wonder, who owns our oversharing? What do they intend to do with it?

The memoir market is a boom industry within the struggling book publishing world. [Need numbers] Coast to coast you can find a half dozen reading series with earnest adults standing before their peers and reading from their high school diaries, and the events are so popular that they’re spawning books and TV shows. Clearly, we are a people obsessed with confessing all. Who has time for privacy concerns when there’s attention to be garnered and money to be made?

I want to write Oversharing in part because I’m curious about the motivations — both of my own and those who share so much of themselves via the web, stage, and books. Is it a gross outgrowth of narcissism, a twisted assumption that the world revolves around each us? Are we all so convinced that we’re stars that we think every little nuanced details of our lives will captivate and amaze the general public?

Or is it that sharing these details act as a great equalizer — we expose ourselves in an effort to relate to one another across the decay of American family and the digital divide. Are we building connections, reaching out to each other in the dark? Or are we merely masturbating away, massaging our own insecurities and neurosis into a frenzy of explosive confessional froth?

I’m curious about how much of this trend is generational — certainly Gen Y (the so-called Millenials) are at the forefront of oversharing online — but there’s no ignoring that people of all ages have confessional verbal diarrhea in substantive quantities. Are the motivations and privacy concerns different for a 19 year old and a 50 year old? Who has more to lose by telling all? Who has more to gain? How do their stories differ?

I want to reassure the frightened parents and educators that oversharing is ok — just as we’ve reached a place where the presidents can admit that they didn’t inhale, or are recovering alcoholics, in a couple decades we may reach a place where presidents can laugh off old MySpace photos of them flashing their ass at a Mardi Gras party.

In its very title, Oversharing implicitly asks a question — what’s “over” and what’s just sharing? I’d like to explore the criticisms of movement, since there no shortage of writers and culture pundits who point to the trend of unfiltered nonfiction as the scourge of the American media and one more tear in the fabric of our cultural norms. Barbara Kingsolver was recently quoted as saying, “‘Because it really happened’ is the worst reason to write anything, leading directly to ramshackle prose and the painful American custom of oversharing. I suppose 10,000 bloggers would disagree with me on that point. Perhaps here we’ve hit upon the distinction between blogger and author.” (A year of eating locally, Salon.com, April 30, 2007). A journalist bemoaned, “We live in a YouTube generation that has forgotten how to blush” before going to alarmingly squeal, “A less uptight society is one thing … but a society that has no compass where privacy is concerned is quite another” (The Age Of TMI, The Hartford Courant, April 17, 2007).

Oversharing would combine the narrative/investigative style of Mary Roach’s STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers with the cultural critique of books like Jake Halpern’s Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction and David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise. Oversharing’s structure would also have some similarities to my first book, Offbeat Bride, with topical chapters using my narrative as a way of introducing the topic, and then go into research and others’ stories. However, where-as Offbeat Bride was a memoir/service book, Oversharing would be more of a memoir/cultural trend book. Think one third memoir, one third media studies, and one third culture critique.

My desire to write this book is in part fueled by a desperate desire to read the book. There aren’t many comparable books written in this format. Academic Jean M. Twenge’s pop-psych study of narcissism, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, comes close, but has a narrower focus and lacks the personal narrative. There are books that explore the social impacts of blogging, like Rebecca Blood’s We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture or Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business,and Culture. But these books tell nothing of the trends of privacy and self-expression outside from blogs — hell, they don’t even dwell on other digital outlets like social networking sites like MySpace, mobile check-in sites like Twitter, podcasts or video diaries. Perhaps the closest is the upcoming book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, by Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen. However, where as that book is written as a polemic against Web 2.0, Oversharing presents a less-biased exploration of user-generated content within the larger cultural context of oversharing in books, on stage, on the radio, and in other mediums.

The time is clearly hot for this subject. Mainstream publications are touching on facets of this oversharing in trend pieces with titles like ‘Confessional culture’ draws a crowd (Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 15, 2007). The cover of the February 15th 2007 New York Magazine screamed “i am not interested in privacy. Online, i reveal everything — my breakups, my bank balance, my breakfast cereal, my body. my parents call it shameless. i call it freedom,” and then went on to titlate readers with the promise that the article would readers “Understand the greatest generation gap since rock ‘n’ roll.” (New York Magazine (“Say Everything,” Feb. 15, 2007). Time Magazine even went so far at the end of 2006 as to identify YOU, the producer of user-generated content (much of it confessional) as their person of year last year (“Time’s Person of the Year: You,” Dec. 13, 2006).

While each of these features touches on confessional culture and the digital generation gap, it’s clear that oversharing is emerging from the shadows of the web and underground events. And if the near-daily hysterical news reports about how parents should be terrified about what their children share on MySpace are any indication, people of multiple generations care about the subject. I want to pat the sooth the full frontal freakout of the columnist who moaned, “If kids are being groomed with such openness now, it has to make you wonder where are we headed. I don’t want to know.”

While the primary markets for this book would include cultural trend mavens and media junkies, it will be written with a keen eye towards both parents and marketers looking for insight into confessional society.

No doubt oversharers will be curious themselves as well, and if nothing else the book’s inclusion of bloggers, MySpace addicts, writers, and navel gazing geeks of all sorts lends it well to viral marketing. In addition, my website, electrolicious.com, acts as a natural buzz builder and marketing tool, with 5000+ visits a week. Electrolicious is also heavily linked within the blogsphere, providing apple opportunities for online word of mouth promotion, similar to what I used to promote my first book, Offbeat Bride. Oh, and speaking of Offbeat Bride, readings and promotional events consistently pulled in people uninterested in weddings — people so intrigued by my perspective that they were willing to sit through a topic that wasn’t relevant to them. This suggests there’s a readership demand for a less niche-market book from me.

One of the advantages of writing about media and society is that there’s nothing the media loves to talk about more than itself, making Oversharing’s media opportunities quite hot. There’s a recognized shortage of commentators on the subject of oversharing and online privacy, as the frenzy around MySpace commentators like danah boyd evidences. Hot online topics like MySpace, YouTube, and blogging receives thousands of media mentions each week.

I’m a known culture/lifestyle commentator with established media credibility. I’ve been interviewed by NPR’s Marketplace, The Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, the BBC, Bust Magazine, and public radio stations like WNYC and Seattle’s KUOW radio. My projects have been covered by publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

My diary-reading series, The Salon of Shame, has been referenced by the BBC, Newsweek, and the LA Times, making me an established authority on the subject of oversharing.

I’ve written for over a decade about emerging cultures with magazine and newspaper trend pieces, and am an professional web geek/marketer with the professional background to provide insight about the nuances of social media like blogging, myspace, and youtube. I’m currently employed as a Marketing Manager appealing to Gen Y markets at Microsoft, and past jobs include a Web 2.0 company that encouraged jobseekers to publicly post their feelings about past employees on the web — in other words, it was my job to encourage people to confess their work sins.

This suggests a demand for a more general interest book.
THE STRUCTURE

Oversharing would hang an investigation into this confessional cultural trend onto a narrative structure, following the author as I explore my motivations for my own public confessions, and research a culture obsessed with sharing and consuming intimate personal stories. Where anecdotal evidence is the only evidence that matters.

Research would include humorous and insightful interviews with the confessors on the front-line, from the teenagers discussing their drug use on facebook.com, to the 20something memoirists like bestseller Koren Zailckas writing books about their alcoholism, to the 30-something “mommybloggers” like Heather Armstrong (the tell-all blogger of Dooce.com), to the 40-something geek-chic hipsters who read their diaries on stages. And what about the now-married woman who’s journal I’ve read since she was 15 years old? I’ll talk to her, too. I’d talk to well-known memoirists like Toni Bentley (who wrote a memoir called The Surrender, dedicated to anal sex) and Chuck Kloske (who can’t write about music without telling you about this girl he’s been seeing) to explore what motivates them to share their quietest moments with the world.

I’d also talk with the enablers, meeting with blogging industry experts like Anil Dash and Evan Williams, memoir editor Geoff Kloske, and diary reading facilitators like New York’s Sarah Brown. “Talking head” interviews with media studies academics like danah boyd and culture critique authors Jake Halpert and Douglas Rushkoff would add a depth and context to the conversation.

In the twisted meta-awareness that a book like Oversharing would demand, I would also include first person accounts of my own experiences with blogging, diary readings, memoir-writing, and reality television. Sharing this first-person narrative makes the cultural personal — exploring how one woman explains and justifies her own oversharing with a culture that feeds and consumes it.

Introduction: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really happen? Or, if I don’t tell everyone what I ate for lunch today, then will I still be hungry? Meet your host on this adventure through the wilds of Too Much Information.

1. A brief history of confession
A little lighthearted cultural context with a brief glimpse at the traditional roles of confession in religion and culture, from Catholicism to reality television.

2. Dear Google, Please Read My Diary: Confession on the web

1. What I ate for lunch today: Blogs
Blogger Heather Armstrong, industry expert Anil Dash, author Douglas Rushkoff

2. Status changed to single: Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace
Academic danah boyd, Journalist Emily Nussbaum

3. Are you there God, it’s me, You Tube: Video Diaries
Vlogger and pornographer Halcyon Styn, guy from Tarnation

4. Who needs the FCC to share your secret dreams: Podcasts
15 year old podcaster Emo Girl Talk.

3. Speak Into The Microphone: Oversharing on Stage & Radio

1. Diary-readings (LA’s Mortified, NY’s Cringe, Seattle’s Salon of Shame, Canada’s Angst, etc.)
Cringe’s Sarah Brown, Mortified’s David Nadelberg

2. Radio
David Sedaris, Seattle’s Phyllis Fletcher

3. Confessional Art
Tracey Emin, David Schmader

4. Who Wants Fiction? Tell Me It’s Based On A True Story: The Rise (and fall) of Memoir
Meaghan Daum, Chuck Kloske, Toni Bentley (The Surrender, an entire memoir about anal sex), James Frey (Why do we care if it’s actually true?), Dave Eggers & David Sedaris editor Geoff Kloske

5. The $20,000 question: does anyone give a shit?
Is this the dawn of an era of democratized communication and digital identity forming our hedonistic descent into rampant narcissism? If we’re all stars, who’s left to watch the show?

6. Drawing The Line Somewhere: What To Withhold and What To Reveal. Related: Is it dangerous? What are the ramifications?
In order of likelihood: being accused/caught lying, encountering trolls online, losing your job, getting arrested, being stalked.