It’s 7:30am.
You’re sitting down at
your table with a cup of instant and half a pomegranate thumbing your way down
your Facebook feed trying to coax yourself into a semi-wakened state. You
glimpse an article with the words ‘Trump’, ‘evolution’ and ‘Mexicans’ in the
headline and before your brain has caught up you find yourself in a
comments-war with racists and climate change-deniers.
You write a blog post
instead. It blows up. You get spiteful messages from tattooed men with fish in
their arms calling you a communist. You become resentful of anyone who doesn’t
have at least three facial piercings and an electric blue pixie cut.
–
A recent study linked the behaviour of ‘over-sharing on social media’ to a hardwired neural mechanism. It
got a fair amount of traction (despite only having 35 participants) because it
suggests what many of us like to believe about those who slather every opinion they have across their various social accounts.
The study claimed that heightened activity in the medial
prefrontal cortex and the precuneus, areas involved in expression, self-reflection,
and decision-making, caused people to share more.
Another study concluded that
parents share so much about their children without permission that the children
are even liable to sue in some countries. It
seems that the age of teens scolded for texting at the dinner table has given
way to the age of parents using dinnertime to dick around on their iPads and skype
Aunt Helen footage of Little Timmy throwing up on the dog.
 |
| "Look Krystall, it's you! Shitting yourself in the supermarket!" |
Over-sharing is not a new phenomenon, and it is not one that
can be post-rationalised as a ‘hardwired’ behaviour based on questionable
research methods.
 |
| In this case, experimenter bias. |
The consensus over the past decade about online behaviour
has been primarily attributed to sociocultural factors, and that won’t change
anytime soon. We over-share because others do, and because most online spaces
are designed to prod at you until you do.
Popular news sources structure their content in such a way as
to encourage controversy. Their primary goal has always been to provoke an
emotional response. Even though this has become so widespread that ‘clickbait’
has entered the general lexicon, it hasn’t stopped us from over-sharing. It
hasn’t stopped us from putting the value of our own opinions over the value of
facts.
It hasn’t stopped you from writing a blog post about how
Donald Trump is a giant asshat; an opinion that most sensible people hold but
is nonetheless echoed into the void because it reels in likes, shares, and followers.
How many times do we come across articles about those who
disagree with majority opinions, despite their subjectivity, being endlessly
slandered or harassed by those who have so much vitriol that they cannot even
acknowledge a contrary viewpoint? How many times have we noticed others
commenting on an article or news source purely to oppose the arguments of those
who oppose the premise stated in the title, without actually reading the
article themselves?
We live in an attention-economy; of black-and-white
journalism and murky grey science, and any attempt to reconcile the two
inevitably triggers an explosion of misinformed, biased, or ignorant opinions
sourced from equally misinformed, biased, or ignorant sources.
 |
| Case in point. |
Opinions that we are all entitled to, but opinions
nonetheless.
The alternative is mentally taxing. We tell ourselves we
don’t care. Opinions that contradict ours are surely formed by stupid people,
and naturally we don’t have the time for it. Engaging with the opinions of
others goes against the journalistic structure that encourages debate and
dissent – even the unhealthy kind – that has so quickly become the default.
Well-informed opinions come from taking in as much as
possible from as many sources as possible, and coming to a conclusion through
critical thinking and scepticism, free from the influence of business agenda.
Over-sharing is the flip side. When we over-share, it is
usually a spur-of-the-moment emotional behaviour. It may be expertly worded
over many paragraphs, but it still conforms to our original emotional response.
For most of us, it is difficult to work against initial gut feelings, as we are
biased to internalise our own emotional responses over the responses of others,
however factual they may be.
But absorbing information from multiple sources allows us to
think critically about how the information is structured, and what agendas or
biases may be behind them.
It’s not about stupidity or ignorance, it’s about attention.
It’s about not allowing an initial reaction or gut feeling to influence an
entire worldview. When we listen and consider the arguments on all sides, we form
better opinions as a result, but that doesn’t happen without paying attention
to them in the first place.
a.ce
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