RMM

There’s a new word in the dictionary. The description of overshare (verb) is “to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval.”
There has been plenty of discussion over the interwebs of our new and often rather ugly tendency to overshare. Especially with personal info, many theories, both positive and negative, have cropped up as to where this overflow was spawned.

The writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto claimed that the creation of the internet coincided with an inevitable social shift, and gave an outlet to our voices which had been suppressed to some extent since the industrial revolution. Mass production, media, and marketing had, until now, reduced us to stereotyped audiences rather than individuals. Now social media has given us somewhere to voice our personal views.

More recently, the internet has given wider scope to our growing obsession with celebrity. 15 minutes of fame has become fame in 15 people. Some argue that this is why people overshare online: they want their little helping of the celebrity which now constantly surrounds us, and the internet is the only place they can.

The advantages have already shown themselves. For me, the two greatest benefits are the way that social media allows us to see how other people are similar to ourselves, and also how, by being on such a wide scale, everyone can find something they relate to, no matter how marginalised the topic may be.

Privacy, at the other end of the scale to oversharing, is often overlooked. Clive Thomson says of the early days of Facebook, “Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends.”

People have been discovering for over a decade now how oversharing personal information can have some nasty repercussions. Emily Gould, in her article for New York Magazine, describes how pulling her personal life onto the web eventually ruined most of her relationships and took over her entire world. Journalist and internet celebrity, Julia Allison, started a blog, JakobandJulia.com, with her CollegeHumour and Vimeo founder boyfriend, Jakob Lodwick, as an experiment in blogging all the ups and downs of a relationship. The relationship ended 3 weeks later, via the blog. On a more practical level, video podcaster, Israel Hyman, tweeted publicly about a trip out of town. When he returned his home had been burgled.  Hyman personally related the incident to his twitter activity.  Lifestyle blogger, Petite Anglaise, was fired from her job when she was accused of blogging about her company (in what later became a highly publicized lawsuit, which she won and from which she gained a 2 peice book deal from Penguin).

I read a huge variety of these lifestyle type blogs, and what occurs to me is that all these writers are struggling to find a middle ground with sharing information. The whole point of social media is to share and interact; I think people love this, and want to explore and utilize it, but at the same time I think we all have a point at which we want the window into our lives to have a frame. Most of us (with perhaps the exception of Big Brother contestants…!) want to maintain some level of privacy. The issue here is that people can’t seem to find this middle ground, with oversharing on one end of the scale, and privacy on the other. The internet has created virtually unlimited opportunity in terms of communicating; but just because we can share everything, doesn’t that mean we should.

What I hope to discover in the next blog post is how we can find this middle ground. I am certain that there will not be a definitive answer, but I will outline some guidelines that, in my opinion, everyone can follow and bear in mind when sharing online.