The real reason why we overshare

BuzzFeed meanwhile said it would expand in several ways.

BuzzFeed meanwhile said it would expand in several ways.

Published Sep 8, 2013

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Washington - Perhaps you’ve met a fellow dog walker in the park who, just six minutes into your first conversation, started talking about her daughter’s menstrual cycle. Maybe you have a roommate who shouts updates from the bathroom every time he endures a marathon session on the toilet. These are oversharers – people who either don’t know what’s generally considered inappropriate to divulge or simply doesn’t care.

When it comes to posting things on the internet, however, it seems everyone is susceptible to oversharing. There’s something alluring about filling those empty white boxes with embarrassing anecdotes – anecdotes BuzzFeed publishes in list form for everyone else to laugh at.

Judging by humour sites such as Lamebook, there doesn’t appear to be a scarcity of material to draw from.

 

Why? What compels us to type to the world what we’d hesitate to utter in a room of loved ones?

Social scientist and author Sherry Turkle thinks we’re losing a healthy sense of compartmentalisation. Last year, Harvard researchers found the act of sharing our thoughts and feelings activates the brain’s neurochemical reward system in a bigger way than when we report others’ opinions. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bernstein of the Wall Street Journal concluded our newfound urge to disclose is partially due not only to the erosion of private life through the proliferation of reality TV and social media, but also to our subconscious attempts at controlling anxiety.

“This effort is known as ‘self regulation’ and here is how it works,” she writes. “When having a conversation, we can use up a lot of mental energy trying to manage the other person’s impression of us. We try to look smart, witty and interesting, but the effort required to do this leaves less brain power to filter what we say and to whom.”

While these viewpoints help us better understand the oversharing epidemic, they don’t address how the web entices us to expose information we probably wouldn’t otherwise.

Some of the latest research to directly tackle this issue comes from Professor Russell 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 next month, Belk argues that our relationship with social media is creating a more complex idea of who we think we are. Through Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube, whose former slogan was “Broadcast Yourself”, we construct our identities in a manner that has never before been possible.

“When we’re looking at the screen we’re not face-to-face with someone who can immediately respond to us, so it’s easier to let it all out – it’s almost like we’re invisible,” said Belk, of the so-called “disinhibition effect” that online sharing helps create. “The irony is that rather than just one person, there are potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands of people receiving what we put out.”

Belk writes: “The resulting disinhibition leads many to conclude they are able to express their ‘true self’ better online than they in face-to-face contexts. This does not mean there is a fixed ‘true self’ or that the self is anything other than a work in progress, but apparently self-revelation can be therapeutic”, like a psychoanalyst’s couch.

It appears that we now do a large amount of our identity work online. For the internet constantly asks us: “Who are You? What do you have to share?” Coupled with new self-revealing proclivities, this incites more open self-extension.

The feedback of friends, family members, acquaintances, and strangers provides criticism and validation. Forging a personal identity, after all, is generally considered a collaborative effort.

Some might point out that the perceived increase in oversharing is nothing more than that: a perception. In other words, it’s not that there’s an eruption of people willing to bare everything online; it’s that those who do post more status updates and garner more exposure on news feeds.

While difficult to measure, the Washington Post published a survey last year stating that only 15 percent of American social media users feel they share either “everything” or “most things”. More than 60 percent of Saudi Arabian participants felt they belong in that category. As the accompanying story implies, the survey doesn’t account for the different cultures. While tweeting about your aunt’s divorce might be considered taboo in one country, it might be received with a shrug in a nation inured to the antics of the Kardashians.

Still, something seems amiss when people feel it’s more important to express a desire on Facebook for the president to be assassinated than it is to, say, exercise tact or avoid losing your job. (Yes, that woman was fired.)

Another ingredient encouraging online exhibitionism is, Belk says, the “tension between privacy and potential celebrity”. For some people, the longing to be popular far outweighs the longing to be respected.

According to a 2010 study, playfully titled, “Examining Students’ Intended Image on Facebook: What Were They Thinking?!” Facebook users who didn’t mind if strangers viewed their profile, as opposed to those who did, were “significantly more likely to post inappropriate content and to portray an image that would be considered sexually appealing, wild or offensive”. In other words, they want everyone to think they’re cool.

 

In sum, the traditional line separating what’s private from what’s public is disintegrating with each overshare. Belk’s research suggests it’s our quest for identity that’s propelling this disintegration. We want to be interesting, memorable. We want people to follow us, but we need their attention first.

And reality TV has taught us that the lowest common denominator is the easiest and most efficient way of getting people to notice. – Slate/The Washington Post News Service

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