Slate wonders if people on Facebook might be oversharing:
… Social scientist and author Sherry Turkle thinks we’re losing a healthy sense of compartmentalization. Last year, researchers at Harvard found that the act of sharing our personal thoughts and feelings activates the brain’s neurochemical reward system in a bigger way than when we merely report the attitudes and opinions of others. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bernstein of the Wall Street Journal asked around and concluded that our newfound urge to disclose is partially due to not only the erosion of private life through the proliferation of reality TV and social media, but also due to our subconscious attempts at controlling anxiety…
Some of the latest research to directly tackle this issue comes from professor Russell W. Belk, chair in marketing at York University in Toronto. In his most recent paper, “Extended Self in a Digital World,” which will appear in the Journal of Consumer Research this October, Belk argues that our relationship with social media is gradually creating a more complex idea of who we think we are as individuals. Through Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube, whose former slogan was “Broadcast Yourself,” we construct our identities in a manner that has never before been possible…
As Jen Doll notes at the Atlantic Wire, “[N]o one gets criticized specifically for undersharing. No one says that word. People just say ‘boring.’”…
I’m so old, I remember complaining some thirty-odd years ago that I didn’t really want to know so much about the sexual predilictions of named individuals that I’d never even met. But that was in a print forum with a circulation limit of fifty, in a ‘global’ community of maybe a few thousand, so the odds of anyone reading my plaint today are very very limited. (Especially since I think I was still using ditto masters, which fade into invisibility.) All hail the modern Invisible Village, where our every vagrant impulse will follow us as long as the electronic formats are retained!
So… that having been said, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Suffern ACE
Tonight? Taking another selfie. Maybe this one will impress my new found swinging sexter friends.
Liquid
I remember a lady asking my friend “why aren’t you on Facebook?”
His response – “What, am I a fifteen year old girl?”
Granted that was a few years ago but it’s as good an excuse as anything else.
BGinCHI
Um, not if what I see on BuzzFeed and FB are any indication. Oh, wait, maybe he means Canadian complexity.
Factoid: I did PhD work at York before transferring down to the states to finish my degree. Great school with the smartest grad students I’ve ever known. Truth be told I love Canada.
srv
I don’t think Fuckhead shares enough with us.
But that thread a couple weeks ago was really a Debbie Downer.
lamh36
I’m on facebook. I use it to talk to my family, to reconnect with high school friends and to stay in touch with my DFW peeps now that I’m in Baton Rouge.
I don’t have the problem some people do with FB, but then again, I limit my page to people who I consider good peeps and I am quick to “unfriend” anyone who post crazy shit on my timeline.
Gin & Tonic
My brain must be different, then, because sharing my personal thoughts and feelings gives me the heebie-jeebies, even with people I know IRL. Those threads here where people post about being alcoholics or abuse victims are just plain creepy, and I skip over them. And I don’t have Facebook or Instagram accounts.
Dead Ernest
@Gin & Tonic:
That is so very interesting G&T.
Please, do tell a little more and how you feel about that. *chin propped on palms, patiently, quietly, just looking at you …earnestly*
aimai
I don’t really have a FB presence. I have a page but it has nothing on it. I have used it to touch base with/locate a few people but I don’t actually keep up with them at all–I don’t read their feeds or have any information. But I do think that the internet has, in other ways, enabled me to construct a social life online that is independent of my social life IRL. Its not as satisfying as a real life set of friends but people don’t seem to socialize that way in my world, anyway. I belong to no overlapping sets of people (highschool, university, work) and neither does my spouse so there are no occasions–totally unlike John’s world–where I would have occasion to just kick back and socialize with someone, face to face. Certainly not a lot of someones who all know me from different parts of my life. Its sad but I don’t think its that unusual around here. So the internet offers me some place to chat and argue with like minded people minus the social sturm and drang.
Gin & Tonic
@Dead Ernest: Eliza? Is that you?
CaseyL
I started to dismiss this, with a snarky remark about how we’ve just replaced one mode of being social with a different one.
Then it occurred to me Belk might be right.
In the old days, when people interacted with one another face to face, most of us had a variety of social “selves,” depending on the setting. A work-self, a home-self, a hang-out-with-the-besties self, a new-romance self, and so on. Sometimes they intersected, to various degrees.
That is the thing social media makes much more difficult. If anyone wants to badly enough, they can find and follow all of another person’s avatars. Employers are already doing that; harrassers certainly are as well.
So people will continue to compartmentalize, but the compartments will no longer be as separate as once upon a time.
Not sure if that means people will be more honest and authentic, since what they say can be tracked, or if they’ll become more artificial and single-dimensional, in order to keep what little private-self there is still private.
Rex Everything
Hey Anne, when you referred to “incoming President HClinton/Booker/Gillibrand/Christie/Walker/JBush/Paul/Insert-Name,” were you trying to say Hillary’s as bad as a Rethug, you firebagger, or is her position at the top of the list just wishful thinking, you PUMA?
Dead Ernest
@Gin & Tonic:
Whir …click, click, sproing … ;-)
Belafon
And the government will be able to search it because you expect privacy without knowing what it means.
raven
I like Facebook, I just don’t fuck around with people that disagree with me.
Lee Rudolph
@aimai: I had a large (if narrowly focused) USENET/altnet presence when such a thing still existed. One of my alt.* groups, and my own soc.* group, both had cores (several different cores each) of people who, to various degrees, in various ways, at various times, met each other in the flesh (several marriages, at least one divorce, a growing number of wakes…); I was in one such for one alt.* group, and met a few—three or four—members of another such for the soc.* group, once. The core of the alt.* group became a set of interlinked mailing lists that persists today, 20 years on from their founding, with (sometimes) up to 100 mails a day. The core of the soc.* group moved to FB and I barely hear from or about anyone there anymore; I’m sort of sad about that, but I don’t have as much energy as I did, either.
I started reading and posting to (a select few) blogs only quite recently (and reading another select few without commenting). The chief difference that I find is the pervasive use of nyms: most members of what I’ve called the cores of the newsgroups that I frequented identified themselves by their “real life” names (as I do still, here and elsewhere), even many of the women. All the newsgroups in question were unmoderated, but the culture was such that cruel (as contrasted with artful…) trolling, sexual or other harassment, stalking, etc., could be *very* well suppressed (in ways that probably wouldn’t work now, alas), only very, very occasionally requiring dubious measures. Perhaps because of that, non-core members also tended to identify themselves by “real names” (e.g., at one period, Amanda Marcotte in her early youth; she and Clay Shirky may be our most web-known alumni/ae). I miss that.
I haven’t yet made any effort to meet any people, known to me via blogs, in meatspace. Eventually, maybe.
Nicole
I like FB. I’ve reconnected with several people from high school, some of whom I didn’t know that well, and, much to my surprise, they’re much funnier, kinder and more interesting than they were back then. I’m hopeful they think the same about me.
Of course, on the other hand, I have the acquaintances who offer praise and gratitude to God because, thanks to HIS GOODNESS, the appraisal for their house came in at the estimated amount! – but that’s all good too, because then I have something to laugh about with my husband.
Keith P
One of my big pet peeves that caused me to quit FB was the amount of information people would post about. Every little minutiae of their lives, down to which grocery store they were currently at (who the hell goes to a grocery store and then posts “I’m at a grocery store”?) Then the people with kids were about 100x worse. Every little hiccup the kid makes leads to a post about it. At the time I quit, I came down with a serious illness, and it seemed like I was being a downer to everyone else’s triviality when I would say something about my health failing. It got to the point where I just didn’t have anything to post about any more.
dollared
@Nicole: I’m with you. I have dozens of friends who are delightful, funny people who do interesting things and who rage at bad drivers in entertaining ways, and I am glad I get to touch them lightly every so often on FB.
Although my friend liking all the really cool things the kids do at Patriot Camp of the Lake Oswego Tea Party is eventually going to give me nightmares….
Liquid
@Keith P: Reminds me of an old (~8 years ago) Penny-Arcade comic:
10:41 — Entered Bagel shop.
10:45 — purchased bagel.
10:47 — UPDATE – bagel yummy.
fuckwit
Aaand…
http://www.dailydot.com/technology/hacker-facebook-bug-report-zuckerberg-timeline/
Hal
Thanks to Facebook I know that a former classmate I haven’t laid eyes or ears on since the late eighties is really pissed about having to press one for English.
God damn Mexicans! Go back to Peru!
fuckwit
HAHAHA, also speaking of trolling, our FP’ers have nothing on Patton Oswalt:
http://www.dailydot.com/lol/patton-oswalt-two-part-tweets/
Most epic trollng evar.
Steeplejack
@fuckwit:
Dick move by Facebook to not pay this guy under their “White Hat” program because he didn’t handle the red tape properly. I bet the next bug he finds bites them in the ass—hard.
kindness
Wait a minute! YouTube & Facebook are burgeoning masses of people sharing their sexual predilictions?
Villago Delenda Est
@Gin & Tonic:
So tell me, Gin & Tonic, why do you hate your mother?
Anne Laurie
@efgoldman:
Believe, at least by the 1970s, not true. Not that I was an experimentor, but some of my friends were well equipped to judge all the best consciousness-altering mechanisms, and those did not include ditto fluid. The stuff used for corrections on wax-coated mimeographic masters, on the other hand…
Also, true story, we had an ongoing issue with the household cats attempting to hide their catnip stashes in the ditto machine’s drum. Don’t know if it was the magikal fluid, or just that our felines were very, very stubborn!
Mnemosyne
I just discovered that a friend from, like, 15 years ago is on LinkedIn. Trying to decide if I should send him a connection.
My only “social networking” is LinkedIn, and that’s only because our HR person recommended I do it. Not too many overshares on that site.
Villago Delenda Est
@fuckwit:
Oswalt rawks! No question about it.
Gin & Tonic
@Villago Delenda Est: My mother died in childbirth, you insensitive clod!
FlyingToaster
@Gin & Tonic: Exactly.
I very occasionally tweet, and am followed by close friends who are guaranteed to be amused by pictures of WarriorGirl sitting in the crabapple on top of the icemountain resulting from Blizzard Nemo. And occasionally I find an extraordinary news photo that I send off to someone more famous to retweet.
But until FaceBook lets me buy an account and configure it the way I want, it ain’t gonna happen. I’m findable in other ways by the degenerates I grew up with, and generally they figure out that I’m not effing interested in their Jeebus-freakishness.
However, my 76-year-old mom is on FB; she used it last fall to post one positive thing about Obama/Biden and one negative thing about Romney/Ryan EVERY DAMNED DAY. My uncle and one of my aunts didn’t send a Christmas card this year. Heh.
Arclite
Read an article about the CIA and how they’re not going to be investing in on the ground spies much any more. Due to the prevalence of social media, almost everyone’s face is/has been on the internet at some point, could be collected and put into a face searchable database. Running a spy’s picture against that DB (via automated cameras or trolling through internet images) could get spies caught pretty quickly.
chopper
@Liquid:
now it’s ‘what am i, my mom?’
Karmus
I am “boring” and proud of it.
Now back to mostly lurking.
Fred
I won’t go on facebook because members of my extended family would undoubtedly spew details of my life that I don’t want out in public and I KNOW that all facebook info will one day be sold off and it’s gonna come back and bite HARD. Mark my words.
TerryC
Humans are now “the animal who publishes.” Could be why language was invented you know: gossip.
Another Holocene Human
It’s one thing to talk about yourself. It’s another thing to be vulnerable, and that’s a lot more difficult.
You’re (OP) quoting research out of context, as becoming vulnerable to others is how relationships are built. And a lot of relationships are built online — we think it’s romantic when it’s medieval or Victorian letters, but somehow stick in a computer and the Luddites come out, eh?
Some oversharers are probably narcissists or exhibitionists or maybe they think that their comments were much more private than they turned out to be on the internets. Some are attention seekers. Clinton is one. He used TV. Ooga booga.
As for sexual stuff, growing up a bit as a country would do us good. All of this excessive shame (which is so easily converted into violent rage) as well as the childish, sniggering attitude affected by so many grown people is just all kinds of ridiculous and needs to be left in the past where it belongs. If you treat sexual matters that way you’re ceding all thought to entities like the Catholic Church and child molesters who will decide for you and yours what boundaries need to be respected. Don’t think so.
Same with child abuse. Keeping silent doubles the shame. Most of the victims have not seen their abusers imprisoned, abusers they were deadly terrified of as children. They may still have PTSD. It’s a silent epidemic and I applaud those courageous souls who first broke the veil of silence. They were viciously attacked by the bystander class who had no involvement with child abuse themselves but covered for abusers by saying it was “a private matter” “not a police matter” “children should obey their parents” “that child is a vicious little liar” “no parent could do that” “mothers have an instinct to love their children” and so on and looked the other way while children were tortured and killed.
Ken J.
@Lee Rudolph:
On the use of real names in Olde Usenet Days: I think what changed was the rise of Google and universal searchability. I know I have clamped down a lot on my online appearances in the last 15 years, and mostly I was only discussing music.
It used to be that stuff posted on Usenet, and on BBS systems, evaporated into the ether in about a month or two, due to the high cost of storing it, unless someone made special effort to save a private copy.
StringOnAStick
I was never interested in FB, but was talked into joining in order to keep in closer touch with some friends in Canada. Initially it worked well for that because all of us posted a lot, and the circle of friends was small.
I’ve seen an evolution happen though with numerous people; most post a lot initially, get tired of the people who post excessively trivial crap, get annoyed with people who use FB as their aggressive marketing device for their business, and eventually realize that what they once personally found fun to do looks an awful lot like bragging/oversharing, at which point they rarely post anymore. It is just too weird a medium; one friend is still working out her issues about being an outcast in high school by seeing how many friends she can accumulate (in the 100’s now) and posting her every athletic achievement/activity in order to get lots of likes and “you rock!” comments; for Christ’s sake, she’s 45 years old.
The thing that I think is the most pernicious about FB/social media in general is exactly this issue with melding all aspects of personality into one easily searchable thread, especially for the stuff we so earnestly felt as teens but will be embarrassed by in a few weeks/months/years. Or the fact that teens are basically tyrannized by the ever shifting rules on how much to post, how often, are you cool or not, don’t get targeted by the packs of haters, etc. I’m not saying that the basic social milieu is any different than it was pre-social media; I have a problem with the fact that what used to be notes tossed in the trash is now curated and monetized by some damned corporation for their benefit alone.
lol
@Ken J.:
Searchable USENET archives existed well before Google (see DejaNews) though Google has since acquired most of them so they now have an archive going back to 1981.