Noisy and ostentatious desperation  

Is it even necessary to point out the irony of an op-ed columnist writing about other people's undiluted passion for self-publicity? I'm amazed that he could get to the end of the column without even a smallish self-deprecation, given the subject. Or maybe he has another column in the works praising the self-awareness of bloggers...

An aside: I wonder if a side effect of this huge outpouring of direct expression might be a decline (certainly a relative decline) in explicit fiction? Maybe I'm reading in the wrong circles, but it always seems to me that any fiction out there is drowning in a sea of confessional non. Or maybe I'm just missing that it's fiction, a la Miss Lonelygirl15. Either way it seems to me the potential for interesting fiction is really vast... particularly fiction that's coy about its own fictionality.