The Oversharing Epidemic

Today I learned about the anonymous messaging board 4chan. At first I was apprehensive about a website that has no type of registration, allows users to post anonymously, and where posts even disappear after a certain period of time. Yet the more I thought about it the more I liked it. These days, my Facebook timeline is filled with "life announcements," engagements, pregnancies, graduations, accomplishments and similar posts, where people are clearly screaming for attention and/or recognition. Now we all need validation and a place to vent our frustrations, I just strongly believe that as humans we shouldn't rely on such superficial means to get that validation.

While 4chan has been around for a long time now, the concept still seems relatively groundbreaking. As simple as it is, I love that in a world where everything is made public there is still some joy to be found in privacy. We live in a world where you can find out what Oprah had for thanksgiving dinner or how many calories Bradley Cooper eats a day. I don't think we realize just how much of ourselves we put out into the world using social media because many of us just grew up using it. After the creation of Myspace, the oversharing epidemic had begun.

I am definitely not against social media. I think it is definitely useful and is quite amazing that you can connect with someone across the world using Facebook. People can utilize social media to make money doing things like blogging just as I am right now, and that is great. I just think that the idea of anonymity also gives people a type of liberation and freedom that you definitely don't get with traditional media outlets. One of my favorite anonymous websites is PostSecret, which posts weekly postcards sent in from all over the world that people have written secrets on. There are no names on them and they usually cover some pretty deep topics, but i love the idea. It develops a great sense of community between these people who are carrying these deep secrets, and it provides a space for them to finally get them off their chest without repercussions.