The Rise of Oversharing WAY TOO MUCH on Social Media

本站添加: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]At what point did our deepest, darkest secrets become public entertainment?

[00:00:05]Let's find out.

[00:00:05]>> You ever just be scrolling on Instagram or Tik Tok when all of a sudden you get hit with one of these?

[00:00:10]>> I'm processing the most triggering breakup I've had in 9 years >> all the time. In fact, I'm actually doing exactly what she's doing when I'm watching it.

[00:00:17]>> So, my entire family just died in a plane crash. Uh, no. Sorry. I just don't really know what to say.

[00:00:23]>> Yep. Just your typical video of somebody posting the mental breakdown they had the night before. Now, this is just one example, but there are many others like it. People badmouthing their spouses or choosing to record their most private arguments. And every time I watch stuff like this, I think to myself, how did we get here?

[00:00:36]>> Okay, listen. I would be lying if I said I wasn't guilty of this at one point in my social media online career. There was a moment in time in social media history where it felt inevitable that if you were a creator, you would basically have to end up sharing something personal of yours. And my god is it a slippery slope because look where we're at now.

[00:00:56]Practically anybody with a phone now can just share their deepest, darkest secrets within themselves and their relationship with others. And now we're at a point where it's basically normalized. Did we as a society become so comfortable to be able to post stuff like this without any shame or regret?

[00:01:11]Like why am I hearing about how much you hate your spouse? Shouldn't those very private matters be kept, I don't know, private? Well, I've got a few ideas, but first we need to understand that there is a very pervasive obsession online that everything, and I really do mean everything, needs to be filmed, captured, and shared for public entertainment. Just got laid off from your job? Well, don't confine in your friends. Turn that traumatic experience of losing almost all of your income into an Instagram reel.

[00:01:35]>> I literally just woke up and I found out I got laid off.

[00:01:37]>> Just went through a messy breakup and you literally cannot comprehend your own emotions about it yet? Well, don't write in a journal, silly. Post a TikTok. And while you're at it, go ahead, leak those DMs. air of the dirty laundry of everyone, you know, because what's going to happen? It's not like there's going to be any repercussions or anything.

[00:01:55]>> I think this particular phenomenon is extremely exclusive to the current time period of that which we live in right now. Because at any time in human history before, think about how ridiculous it would be if you were to like go through something super heavy and serious. Then you would just walk into the center of a mall or a public space and then just scream that you got fired and laid off all in the same day.

[00:02:18]People would be like, "Dude, arrest this person." Meanwhile, now because we have this crazy digital infrastructure of a shared world that we're all involuntarily a part of, I feel like the very action of sharing your personal details has become extremely normalized.

[00:02:34]And if anything, you're almost punished if you're not sharing anything personal of yours. Right? What I've seen now is that if you actually hold back on your personal details, especially if you're like an online creator, people automatically assume that you're up to something no good. But regardless of that, I think we're finally reaching a point in time where everyone's actually seeing realtime consequences of revealing your own personal life online.

[00:02:59]But I think there's more to it than that. Maybe they also like reading the comments about people going through the same things as they are, or maybe hearing different perspectives about the topic they covered in the video. I mean, that's something I can relate to. It's one of the reasons why I enjoy making the videos that I do. Which is why I believe it's only natural to crave connection, to have our thoughts and feelings substantiated by another person, to feel like we're not going through things alone.

[00:03:20]I mean, yeah, to basically summarize it in one sentence, people crave connection. The creator themselves and the people watching that creator, right?

[00:03:28]These days, if somebody basically goes through like some sort of serious personal event, right? Generally comes out as some sort of emotional shock.

[00:03:37]Everyone's been there at one point and you feel like there is like this weight inside your body and brain and heart and it's extremely uncomfortable and most of us are unable to sit with that emotional heaviness over a period of time. So how do we cope with a situation like this in this time period? The most impulsive and quickest way to basically release that energy is to take out your phone and speak out loud as if you're actually talking to somebody. And these days when the loneliness epidemic is through the roof, people generally don't have somebody that they can speed dial to share a personal issue with, most people are probably more comfortable just speaking to a selfie camera as opposed to seeing somebody in person and saying it and seeing their micro reactions and how they would respond to you. On top of that, when you share that personal story online, it's basically the quickest and fastest way to transform those darker emotional problems into a tangible positive result. Is it actually positive in the end? Who knows? But our brain generally gets tricked over the fact that if that video gets a ton of views and a ton of likes and what 50 people basically share the fact that they can connect with your story at that point it basically tricks your own brain to thinking that oh that personal problem isn't so negative anymore because your brain is now pumping a ton of dopamine making you feel better because you got a ton of likes and numerous amounts of strangers online can basically relate to you. Do that a few times and then you've basically retrained your entire behavior into basically oversharing every time something happens. Here's how I think about it. Maybe you don't have friends or family you can talk to. Maybe you do, but for whatever reason, you still feel isolated. Well, then you might do the most convenient thing. Go online and share your thoughts and emotions to the world, hoping that another person might reciprocate, relate, sympathize, or share theirs. Now, with all that being said, this is social media we're talking about. No matter how hard we might try to convince ourselves otherwise, no amount of likes or even the most heartfelt comments like this one for my own channel can fully replace having an actual friend I can call up.

[00:05:49]Exactly. However, it is just not that simple because we live in the modern cyberpunk dystopian time of whatever this century is. And in this century, one of our biggest issues is loneliness.

[00:06:02]But that being said, in general situations in everyday life, in real physical human body life, there are not many circumstances and situations where it even allows for a conversation about personal stuff. Most people don't meet up in general or hang out these days. So even if you were able to meet with somebody, generally you don't really want to just go into like problems for most of the discussion. Most people when they meet in real life, they generally want to keep it, you know, positive and light. So, when it comes to going through something serious or personal, you don't want to exactly overshare with strangers that are in line for coffee, and you don't want to spill your guts out to the barista. Although, I have seen that happen multiple times.

[00:06:48]>> There's bound to be some people who go, "Oh, but wait a second. That video of the girl badmouthing her husband got 3 million views. Maybe I should do the same." And in a world where 12% of the next generation wants to be content creators, a career, mind you, where being a little bit parasocial has its benefits. Well, then here's the million-dollar question. What does getting views actually mean?

[00:07:11]Yeah. Because now we live in a time period where basically everyone and their mom and their child and pet wants to be a content creator, right? And everyone's trying to basically find some sort of life hack and a shortcut on how to make content creation a living now.

[00:07:26]And in this current iteration, the entire content creation game has basically devolved into just straight reality TV. And if you've been around online long enough, you've basically seen this transformation to where it is now. The first iteration of the internet didn't exactly require anything personal at all. In fact, it was really weird to share a real photo of yourself online.

[00:07:47]Somewhere around the middle, it became more okay. And then when YouTube came out and YouTubers became a thing and then you basically you can monetize your own personality into a full-blown paying career. It was around that point where people realize the more personal I go on camera, the more tears that I'll shed, the more apology videos that I post, the higher the amount of views. Because around that time period, not many people were actually sharing anything personal about themselves or crying on camera.

[00:08:17]Can you believe that there was a point where that was weird? And then fast forward a few more years. Now everybody's crying on camera. Everyone's crashing out on camera. Everyone is exposing their innermost thoughts on camera where now it's more normalized.

[00:08:31]And most of the people that are willing to just expose themselves online now they're also a bit younger because generally you don't actually understand the repercussions of losing your privacy until you're older and you mature out of it. Then you start to see the benefits of actually holding personal boundaries and having a private life. And then you're old enough to actually see the harsh consequences of exposing too much of yourself online. Airing out the dirty laundry of people you know or live streaming a private conversation because it makes for good content breaks this boundary. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's a difference between being authentic and having no filter at all. Because now some viewers expect or feel entitled to know certain parts of your private life because they're so used and accustomed to this environment where people just expose everything.

[00:09:24]Oh boy, I hope you didn't catch my thousand yard stare because with my extensive online social media career, I have gone through a lot of the things that he's speaking about. So say if you get online and you want to make content creation a career. So then you start posting stuff about yourself. could be a vlog and showcasing where you live or where you travel to. Then you can start opening up about your personal life and then your relationships and all of these things. And congratulations, you made an entire brand about who you are as an individual. So now you have thousands of people from all over the world that basically watch you for you specifically. The people watching that type of audience generally watch because they want somebody to connect to and they are going to latch on to you parasoccially and sometimes a bit too much. And like he said, it might get to even a point where all of these strangers online that you actually haven't even seen with your own eyes start feeling entitled to you. So, if you begin basically imposing boundaries and withholding information, they're going to take that as a direct insult to them and go from a person that once loved you to somebody that absolutely despises you. And this is where it's most dangerous because if you gather an entire audience that loves being parasocial and nosy and gossipy and is attached to you personally, they are going to pick apart practically anything about you from how you do your hair, from who you talk to. They're going to bring up a bunch of stuff that you might have mentioned once a year ago. They're going to look into where you live.

[00:11:07]They're going to dig and dig and dig because at this point you're no longer just a stranger, an entertainer online.

[00:11:14]You're someone that they feel entitled to and you have to deliver what they're looking for or they could make you pay for it. And it's only until this point do people actually understand the real life consequences about oversharing all of the personal details of your own life to the public online. For the next minute, let's talk about some of the research. There are many different papers that I could bring up, but the one I want to talk about today is the online disinhibition effect by John Cer, a clinical psychologist that published this in 2004. Right in the introduction of the paper, it states that clinicians and researchers have noted how people say and do things in cyerspace that they wouldn't ordinarily say and do in the face-to-face world. They loosen up, they feel less restrained, and they express themselves more openly. A phenomenon that they call the online disinhibition effect. But don't just take my word for it. Here's hit American singer and songwriter Billy Isish.

[00:12:06]>> Don't post everything you think.

[00:12:09]Anybody, if anybody is watching this, don't post your feelings. Don't do it to yourself.

[00:12:18]>> Honestly, yeah, it's really hard to deny this whole infrastructure of the digital online world where everyone's the main character of their own show. This has literally been the first time in human history where basically every single person that you see has the ability to make themselves the main character of their own TV show. Because when you present yourself online, it's this weird in between of you're actually talking to people, but you're actually not at the same time, right? Like I'm looking at you and you're looking at me, but we're actually not looking at each other at all. It's an incredible mind, which is why it's so easy to absolutely dissolve personal boundaries and it's hard to know what's actually okay to share online and what's not okay to share. And literally kind of just have to learn as things progress. And these days with everybody oversharing practically every little detail in their life, we're also seeing actual realworld consequences now. So basically, if you want to make being online a career, just be careful of how you go and approach it. And let me tell you, life is a lot more peaceful like that. Anyways, I would love to hear your thoughts on this current situation.

[00:13:31]Oversharing on the internet going too far, or should we hear more of it? That being said, my name is Pierre. Welcome to Into the Ether.