Technology-Enabled Oversharing? Nah.

Vacation photo by Lyn Millett via Flickr

Technology Thursday

Who cares about your vacation photos? This is the question Danah Boyd explores in a recent post on "obsessively recording and sharing our vacations." She was at BlogHer '09 (along with some of my esteemed colleagues from CurrentMom) and the topic of addiction came up. Boyd used that discussion to riff on the challenge of technology-free vacations and what it means that we are creating a culture of people who are obsessively documenting and sharing their experiences before they've even finished having them. Technology, in the form of gadgets, connectivity, and social networking has made such documentation and sharing easier than it has ever been before.

Boyd wonders whether we are over-sharing. I tend to think that such questions miss the mark. Unless someone is forcibly sitting you down and making you look at their dozens of tweets or hundreds of flickr photos, I don't think over-sharing is the right frame within which to consider these behaviors. Technology doesn't only enable the ability to create and share information on unprecedented scales, it also enables the capability to filter. I follow about 250 people/accounts on Twitter, but do I read every single tweet from every single one of them? Impossible. Similarly, in my RSS feedreader I have dozens and dozens of feeds -- but some of them go unread for weeks or months.

When it comes to vacation photos and "status updates" and such from my friends, though, I'm a big fan. And it would take considerable effort for someone to "over-share" in my estimation. Now, one reason is simply due to the asynchronous nature of the interaction (you post your photos on Flickr on Sunday - I glance through them on Thursday night, and only click through one or two to see a high-res version; you Twitter about climbing the steps of Notre Dame, but I don't see it until I'm scanning my Twitter stream on my blackberry while stuck in a crowd on the Metro escalator). But another, deeper reason, is that I'm wholly convinced of the worth of the notion of "ambient awareness":

“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update - each individual bit of social information - is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.”

But, that's all on the consumption side. As far as the supply side goes, I tend to assume that if people aren't interested in (portions of) my digital output they just won't look at it. There are hundreds of photos of my kid on my Flickr account, many of them public. (Many of his relatives are never going to get a Flickr account and log in to see pictures that are friends-only. I also have come to think that there's no rational basis for keeping kids' photos hidden if the concern is safety--later privacy preferences of the child in question are another issue, but those are topics for another post.) And I have indeed been known to Twitter about my morning coffee. more than once. (But I do usually try to be a little amusing about it.) So I'm probably an over-sharer, but really only online. The Internet has given us introverts an amazing social outlet that doesn't exhaust us--please don't tell us to back off!

More seriously, these are definitely first-world middle-class problems. But given all that we read about how disconnected and yet over-scheduled we all are, how we're all just bowling alone, I'm really reluctant to suggest that anyone is "over sharing" when they're reaching out and trying to make connections. One can debate endlessly about the strength and/or shallowness of relationships that are primarily mediated through technology, but I don't think there's much question that we are social beings and the impulse to share our lives--one way or another--is strong. It drives me bananas (even though I'm an introvert) that I can't easily have people over for in-person chit-chat on a regular basis. Given everyone's schedules, even reaching someone on the phone can be a serious challenge. If modern life means that commenting on (or "liking") your Facebook status is what I'm left with, well, at least you know I'm thinking of you! Now, go post some more vacation pictures!

Watch me over-share on Twitter here; topics include: the quality of my morning coffee, the vacations I'm not taking, how horrible our local baseball team is, and updates on my toddler's recent antics, maybe even my husband's, too.

Comments

[Stacy]

Lynn,

This is a really strong piece - you've given me so much to think about. I have to say I'm all for sharing vacation/kid/baby photos - that's probably my favorite thing about FB and other media - the ability to be there virtually. I don't think it's a substitute for real in-person contact, but that's not always feasible even with people who are close by, let alone friends (and even acquaintances) who live hundreds or thousands of miles away. Wonder if the age of "over-sharing" has made Putnam's "Bowling Alone" thesis a thing of the past. I don't think so because I think there are still big distinctions between online relationships and "real" day-to-day communities and relationships, but I do think technology helps nurture and sustain those "real" contacts. Thanks, again!

[Dan Lyke]

Yeah! Bring on the vacation and kid photos! (And I say that as someone who has neither a kid nor a 2009 summer vacation of any substance).

Because I follow Lyn's pictures and Twitter feed, I feel a stronger connection to her child than I do to my nephews of similar age.

I also think that there's this willingness to believe that the net is opening up new things when it really isn't. I was recently appointed to some local political function, and a friend on Facebook looked at the town web site and said "wow, they published your phone number and everything!". Well, yeah, and 5 years ago we had this thing called "the white pages" and people would have been able to find all of that information there.

Similarly, we used to share slide shows and albums of photos of our trips. Why, when this stuff is moved to the computer, do we suddenly view it as novel and a privacy risk?