To all the chronic oversharers on social media, this one’s for you.
This week, you win the award for the absolutely most irritating person on the Internet. Congratulations.
After 12 years of having a Facebook account, I find that almost nothing on the Internet shocks me these days. However, lately, when I scan through my News Feed, I find that more and more of my friends seem to be getting their online social media accounts confused with their diaries, and it’s unbelievable. When did Facebook get so Live Journal?
Alright. Fine. I’ll be the first one to admit that I am a far cry from a social media saint. I’m that girl who uses social media as a platform to project my sick humor onto the world, and I know that for some, my online activity can be a little bit rude and a lot a bit crude. In fact, almost all of my posts and status updates border on the fine line between inappropriate and wildly offensive. I can only the imagine the horrified look on my father’s face when he reads status updates like, “Dear Superbowl, I don’t give a fuck. Love, Kate” or “When I see you wearing Ed Hardy, it takes everything in me to not hardcore dick punch you,” posted on my Facebook wall for the whole online world to see. I’m almost positive that my inability to demonstrate restraint online is what makes me one of the few people who can say that their mother blocked them on Facebook instead of the other way around.
Surely, my conduct on the Internet, with status updates jam-packed with swear words and sexual innuendoes, isn’t going to help me land a job once I finish graduate school. Any future employer scanning through my Facebook page would probably see my status updates that inquire about how I could get Neil Young to “bone me,” as nothing more than a surefire potential for a harassment lawsuit and a nightmare for their human resources department. But, I’m not going to start worrying about that until my struggle to get a real job leads me to seriously consider registering on Sugardaddy.com and prostituting myself to pay my rent.
But while I’m hard at work coming up with witty Facebook statuses that will make you giggle, or maybe even make you have to duct tape your jaw back to your face because you can’t believe that I actually wrote, “I’ll sit on your face if you bring me beer for breakfast. Get at me,” it insults me when the best you can come up with are overly personal updates about the details of your private life. My Facebook posts tell you that I’m hilarious, and yours tell me that you’re an attention seeking and narcissistic bore.
The problem with living in a day and age where anyone with a smartphone has the ability to access social media apps from almost anywhere in the world is that the potential to overshare on the Internet has become too easy. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as being too open on social networking sites. It’s called being socially irresponsible.
Tell me. On a scale of 1 to 10, just how important is it for the online world to know that you just walked into a room to find your boyfriend cheating on you? Do you feel better after receiving a tumble of virtual, “I’m so sorry, girl” and “You’re better off without him anyways” responses? Does bashing and blasting your boyfriend’s supposed indiscretions on Facebook make him look bad, or does it just make you look pathetic? Oh, and you’re bragging about using physical violence when you found him with another girl? In the wake of a media storm about NFL players and physical violence, don’t you just sound wildly ignorant and uninformed? And when you get back together with him tomorrow, because it turns out he was just working on a school project with a girl from class and not actually cheating on you, how embarrassed are you going to be when you have to a) delete the post and b) explain to all your friends that your hasty, in-the-moment status update was brutally naive?
Chances are, you’re going to wish you waited five minutes to get the whole story before posting a regrettable status update that made you look more like a foolish and crazy adolescent than a composed and rational adult.
Overshare regret. It’s a real thing.
In fact, according to a survey conducted by Badoo, 40 percent of Internet users between the ages of 18 to 35 have regretted posting personal information about themselves, 35 percent have regretted posting information about a friend or a family member and a telling 57 percent of 18- to 35-year-olds think people share too much about their personal thoughts and experiences on the Internet.
True, I may not be sharing intimate details about my personal life on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean that even I don’t sometimes regret some of my naughty status updates. I’ll admit that even my posts on Facebook could stand to be deleted.
So I propose a compromise. When you stop oversharing, I’ll stop swearing. How does that sound?
