Oversharing can be overcaring

Although sites like Facebook and Twitter serve as platforms for personal expression, columnists Kathryn López and Maria Zankey say some users of the social networking sites take it too far.

“Still feeling rather icky. My bowels are being evacuated quicker than a plane sinking in the Hudson.”
We wish we could say we read this quote in a nurse practitioner’s notebook, but we can’t – it’s a Facebook status update.

It should be safe to say when you’re publishing “what’s on your mind” and it shifts to “what’s running through your intestines,” you’re revealing a little too much.

But whether you’re updating about something as medically personal as your diarrhea or something as emotionally invasive as your recent breakup, the theme of oversharing has become common within a vast majority of Facebook statuses, tweets, text messages and other forms of mass and personal communication.

Oversharing has always existed, but the advent of social networking sites among millennials has extended beyond the levels of previous generations. Webster’s New World Dictionary even chose the term as its Word of the Year in 2008, defining overshare as a verb meaning “to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval.”

“We abuse, and have been abusing, every technology we have to use to socialize, from mail and telephones to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook,” said Temple psychology professor Dr. Donald Hantula, who specializes in behavior analysis and consumer choice on the Internet and technology applications. “It’s a matter of sharing with more people, especially within the 15- to 25-year-old age bracket, when the whole world’s going chaotic on you.

“Aristotle referred to humanity as the social animal,” Hantula added.

It’s the reason you passed notes during class in middle school and the reason you spark conversations with the lady in front of you in the grocery store checkout line. People are innately compelled to form connections with other human beings.

So today, they take to social networking sites like Twitter and form relationships in the form of 140 characters.

One Twitter user writes, “leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.”

This update may seem like a few beautifully written lines to be shared, but a quick Google search reveals they are from an Anne Sexton poem about suicide called “Wanting to Die.”

Such cries for help, whether subtle or blaring, often take the form of status updates. While people have always expressed their needs for comfort and attention, they have only recently gained the ability to megaphone them to an audience that, more often than not, extends far beyond their trust circles.

But even seemingly harmless posts about giving your cat a bath or pulling an all-nighter in the TECH Center studying for your math final can conjure negative reactions.

“Somewhere between the time Facebook became a club even Great-Aunt Suzy wanted membership in and Twitter went pandemic, we began to exalt the mundane and worship the inane,” writes Janelle Randazza in her book, Go Tweet Yourself: 365 Reasons Why Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Other Social Networking Sites Suck.

But can you bond with people over the Internet? Randazza says you can’t.

“The more we talk, the less we listen, and the more Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn connections we acquire, the greater chance that any sliver of meaningful contact we could forge will get lost in the din of nudges, pokes, prods and virtual two-steps,” she adds.

We disagree.

Maybe we don’t need to know what you ate for lunch or what time you woke up this morning, and you should probably keep updates on your bowel movement to yourself. But a little openness doesn’t hurt.
When it all boils down, we might be absorbed with our own thoughts, problems and goings on, but we’re still commenting on, retweeting and “liking” each others’, as well.

Kathryn López and Maria Zankey can be reached at templeliving@temple-news.com.

This edition of For Tech’s Sake is Part 2 in a five-column series exploring the link between the attitudes of the Millennial Generation and technology.

Millennial minds crave connectivity, self-importance

The millennial generation’s dependency on new media stems from more than just easy access to technology.

Orange juice and Cheerios are rarely accompanied by a daily newspaper anymore.

There’s no need. The majority of today’s breed of students have already read the top stories on philly.com, checked their e-mails, responded to Facebook wall posts and tweeted about how they wish they could hit their snooze buttons just one more time – all before they roll out of bed and into their slippers.

This generation of “millennials,” as we’re called – born approximately between the early 1970s and late 1980s – is pegged as both more technologically savvy and dependent, and the trend continues to rise.
The Nielsen Company reports that millennials made 255 phone calls per month and sent 435 SMS text messages in 2007, but fast forward just two years to 2009, and millennials are making 191 phone calls per month and sending 2,899 SMS texts per month.

The growth has been staggering, but it should come as no surprise. While this seeming need to consistently transmit and receive information is due largely to the rise of the Digital Age, these Baby Boomer offspring also grew up in a social environment unlike those of generations past.

Let’s rewind to kindergarten. You sang the words “I can do anything better than you” in music class, and your mom let you choose pizza or ham and cheese Lunchables. You were raised in schools where teachers constantly reinforced how “special” and “unique” you are.

“It’s not the same as being ‘spoiled,’ which implies that we always get what we want,” writes Jean M. Twenge in Genertation Me, a book that explains why today’s young Americans are more confident and assertive, yet more miserable than ever before. “We simply take it for granted that we should all feel good about ourselves, we are all special, and we all deserve to follow our dreams.”

And so we do, and we’re sure to let everyone know about it. According to Facebook, there are more than 45 million status updates each day.

“I don’t like to complain, even though I do it often,” one Facebook user’s status reads. “I truly am grateful for the things I have, but there is this emptiness inside of me… I force a smile, I go on with my days…but something is missing and all I can do is pretend I am OK…”

Too-much-information statements like these get a little more personal than the “Steve is going to the gym”-type statuses Facebook probably intended for the feature. But the rate at which we’re increasingly expressing “what’s on our minds” is truly exponential.

Between December 2007 and December 2008, Internet usage as a whole grew 18 percent. Facebook usage, however, grew a whopping 588 percent, according to the Nielsen Company. We’re not spending that much more time on the Internet – we’re just shifting the way we allocate our time on it.

Some of that stems from our kindergarten-rooted vanity, but that’s not the only factor. The more technology becomes accessible and inexpensive, the more people are using it. And as these statistics rise, so do the numbers of questions as to why and how we use it the way we do.

We’ll explore some of these issues and questions here in For Tech’s Sake. We’ll cover over-sharing and digital etiquette. We’ll check out the latest in technology, like Google Wave – a barrier-breaking communication and collaboration tool. We’ll even risk our own millennial sanity, turn off our MacBooks and leave our BlackBerrys at home for 48 hours in an against-the-grain experiment.

But don’t forget that along the way, we’ll be turning to your Facebooks and Twitters, observing your online language and looking into your digital and social trends for our inspiration and reporting because let’s face it – we millennials might pride ourselves on our individuality, but we’re in this together.

“Today, you can watch, listen to, and read whatever you want; seek out and discuss, in exhaustive and insular detail, the kind of news that pleases you,” writes Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, “and indulge your political, social, or scientific theories, whether sophisticated or naïve, extremist or banal, grounded in reality or so far out you’re floating in an asteroid belt, among people who feel exactly the same way.”

Kathryn Lopez and Maria Zankey can be reached at templeliving@temple-news.com.

This edition of For Tech’s Sake is Part 1 in a five-column series exploring the link between the attitudes of the Millennial Generation and technology.