Cleolinda everywhere

Something that made me think possibly because I didn't want get down to work yesterday: Tell Me More! Why Do We Overshare?

I feel like there's been a rise in oversharing since blogs, online journals, social networks, etc., appeared in our lives--it's so much easier to confess your deepest secrets to names on a screen. You can't see the looks on their faces, for one. But the crazy woman cited at the beginning of the story was dumping all her business in real life, so if we're going to stick with the first idea, I'm going to have to say that it's carried over into real life--on a wider scale than it used to be; there were always people who had no sense of tact or boundaries--because, due to the effect of the internet (and reality television: the obligatory confessional cam, tucked away in private where the other housemates can't hear the steam the contestant is blowing off to millions of people ), revelation has become something of a currency. I think that, on some level, we're putting the cart before the horse: it used to be that we just hounded celebrities for the private details of their lives, and now we feel like spilling our own makes us important. I mean, it's what important people do, right? Go on TV and walk us around their houses and tell us their favorite recipes and make coy references to their love lives? Well, now anyone with a blog (or a Facebook, or a Twitter, or a...) can pretend to be just as sought-after. Important people get attention, and spilling our guts on TV or the internet will get us attention as well, and therefore that also makes us important, right?

... Right?

( I don't know if I could be one of them, and I don't intend to find out )