Digital Intimacies and Oversharing as Online Harm

 

What do we choose to share of our "internal world" online, and why?

What impact does what we share with respect to the world within have on us personally, on those in our lives, on the communities in which we move?

When is the sharing of personally relevant information, or self-disclosure, an act of oversharing?

When is the choice not to share personally relevant information, or to engage with others sharing information of importance to the self,  an act of self-silencing? 

How conscious are we of our choices?

How is this changing and shaping how we interact in the digital sphere?

How is this changing and shaping the world beyond our screens?

 

These questions - and many more - are among those considered in research on digital intimacies the ways in which we express, experience and negotiate personal and intimate aspects of our lives through digital technologies. 

Intimacy, as traditionally defined, typically relates to relating with others in a private and comfortable atmosphere, within close personal relationships, including sexual relationships. Traditionally it’s been a word we used mostly around the things we do and say with people we know well.

While the concept of digital intimacy has been associated with the use of technology within friendship, dating and sexual networking, in an increasingly digital culture it has grown to encompass a far broader range of online interactions and behaviours - from the public sharing of personal information to the formation of and management of boundaries and privacy within virtual communities and networks.

In the digital realm, we can be with multiple others – and view ourselves being with others -  in new ways: ways unthinkable in the past (Scarcelli et al, 2023).

The impacts of these changes extend far beyond the screen, and come to condition our participation in everyday modern life (Livingstone, 2011) Our interactions, relationships and identities are now shaped and influenced by a culture in "oversharing has become the norm" (Kennedy, 2018). The concept of the “digital intimate public” is one in which intimate lives are enacted, recorded, shared and commodified in online spaces. Berlant (2008) argued that the proliferation of therapeutic discourses has led to a culture of sharing intimacies in online fora:

Intimacy is created by people sharing details of their private lives, private experiences and feelings, often with expectations of validation, relief, connection and a sense of belonging. However, these interactions might redirect expressions of cultural and intimate discontent in ways that uphold normativity (Mustosmaki and Sihto, 2022).

Oversharing is where posters share information about themselves and their lives that, in the past, would typically have been shared with close friends, partners or in conditions associated with strict confidentiality (e.g. therapy or medical consultations), without much consideration of the need to protect dignity or privacy over the long-term. (Aquisti & Gross, 2006)

It’s often thought of as being a way people – especially younger people – might impulsively seek attention and support in an emotional storm (Barak & Boniel-Nissim, 2013) – perhaps saying things they might later come to regret (Nadkarni & Hofman, 2012; Tice et al, 2007; Medhizadeh, 2010).  

The cognitive behavioural understanding of oversharing, online or in person, is that it can become compulsive, leading to reduced engagement and validation over time, intensifying the person's efforts to connect, as mental health practitioner Purity Wangechi visualises in the "oversharing cycle" diagram below: 

 Perhaps, in the heat of the moment, sitting alone at a screen,  the young or vulnerable person may feel they are only posting to those they know well, failing to consider the wider audience who might see their words, (Vitak, 2012), beginning a cycle in which feelings of being unseen and unheard is unwittingly exacerbated by reduced positive feedback. 

Danah Boyd (2014) however, challenges assumptions that most teenagers either don’t know or don’t care about privacy, suggesting the majority of teenagers are, in fact, acutely aware of their audience, often (as teenagers have always done) encoding what is truly private and meaningful to them in shared memes and song lyrics.

Most kids online, she argues, are alright – though as she points out, those who aren’t, really aren’t. Young people struggling with offline abuse or mental health concerns in isolation find a place to be visible online, a place to make their pain known to the world.

“And what they share in plain sight is often frightening for people who imagine that childhood is always a precious experience to be cherished. Although the internet may not be inherently dangerous place, it’s certainly a place where we can see kids who are in danger, if we are willing to look”. (Boyd, 2014, p.125).

McGlotten (2013) suggests that there’s a sense that sharing that type of pain online is dangerous – a “diminished and dangerous corruption of the real thing” (McGlotten, 2013, p. 7), drawing media commentary about the “excessive” publicization of personal experience as “attention seeking”.

Yet as Boyd points out, perhaps all that’s really happening when young and vulnerable share their personal experience is the impact of more affluent and privileged people seeing what they don’t want to see – being confronted with the humanity that has always existed beyond the walls of gated communities and affluent suburban communities.

When is oversharing an aspect of personal pathology and when is it a means of speaking uncomfortable truths that might otherwise not be aired?  Is the problem really that a young or vulnerable person is telling the story of their experiences of child abuse and poor mental health? Or is the problem, well, that a great many people have experienced child abuse and poor mental health? 

When we moralise “oversharing” as “bad” in this context, what are we really moralising about?  And who is the subject of that moralising? Is “oversharing” always a problem, or deemed excessive and pathological for some, while being celebrated by others in ways that have been structured on gender, race and class? (Dobson, Carah and Robbards, 2018).  

Mariame Kaba, a community activist, thinks these are valid questions, but contends act of sharing personal stories of adversity and harm online can be a murky area. While she sees it as having some positives - such as leveling power differentials and giving people a way to speak back to those they can't access in other ways, particularly organisations and institutions, she asks us to hold in mind that it can also become a way to get at people, or control narratives in ways that are less about addressing harms with a view to achieving better outcomes than to avoid accountability for harms that they may have played a part in causing.

People, in other words, are messy and complex - and conflict is messy and complex. She urges people to remember  that what happens online is no less real for taking place on a screen: 

"I also tell people, especially those of us who are older and didn't come of age in social medial land, that people should not be talking about social media and "real life" as though they're distinct. What is happening online is happening offline, and what is happening offline is happening online. What happens offline bleeds into the online world, and vice versa. I tell people, don't minimise the effects of social media"  (in Dixon and Piesna-Samarasinha, p.287)

This blog series will consider the complexity of negotiating intimacy in digital spaces from social media, to gaming communities to AI, wondering about the possibilities of evolving an ethic of

 “expanded care and radical shamelessness in relation to public intimate traces, disclosures and performances for anybody who desires or needs such, towards cultures where intimacies and emotional styles of diverse kinds can be performed publicly without shame or judgement” (Dobson et al, 2018, p. 48).

 

References

Acquisti, A., & Gross, R. (2006). Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook. Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 36–58.

Barak, A., & Boniel-Nissim, M. (2013). The therapeutic value of adolescents' blogging about social-emotional difficulties. Psychological Services, 10(3), 333–341.

Boyd, d. (2014). It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press.

Dixon, E. and Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L., . (Eds.). (2020). Beyond survival: Strategies and stories from the transformative justice movement. AK Press.

Dobson, A. S., Carah, N., & Robards, B. (2018). Digital intimate publics and social media: Towards theorising public lives on private platforms. Digital intimate publics and social media, 3-27.

Livingstone, S. (2011). Media literacy: Ambitions, policies and measures.

McGlotten, S. (2013). Virtual intimacies: Media, affect, and queer sociality. State University of New York Press.

Nadkarni, A., & Hofmann, S. G. (2012). Why do people use Facebook? Personality and Individual Differences, 52(3), 243–249.

Mehdizadeh, S. (2010). Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 13(4), 357–364.

Krijnen, T., Nixon, P., Ravenscroft, M. and Scarcelli, C.M., 2023. Identities and Intimacies on Social Media: Transnational Perspectives (p. 235). Taylor & Francis.

Tice, D. M., Butler, J. L., Muraven, M. B., & Stillwell, A. M. (2007). When modesty prevails: Differential favorability of self-presentation to friends and strangers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 662–683.

Vaillancourt-Morel, M.P., Bergeron, S., Blais, M. and Hébert, M., 2019. Longitudinal associations between childhood sexual abuse, silencing the self, and sexual self-efficacy in adolescents. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 48, pp.2125-2135.

Vitak, J. (2012). The Impact of Context Collapse and Privacy on Social Network Site Disclosures. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(4), 451–470.

Wengechi, P. (2023). The Oversharing Cycle. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7139910273787756544?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28V2%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7139910273787756544%29