Are You Oversharing On Your Blog?

Over on the New York Times, Emily Gould writes a piece about sharing - or Oversharing, as the case may be, when writing blogs and on social networking platforms. It's an interesting topic that she covers in some depth, and raises the issue of where our privacy and right/write to say what we like stands when it involves Other People and what is essentially their business, and perhaps should be their call on what to keep private and what they may be willing to share. Willing to share now... and later down the track when the rosy glow of a love affair may be long cold.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises for me when I first became interested in Myers-Briggs personality typing and joined a group for my own type, was to see where we fell into areas of "likeness" in some ways, but even more so, where the differences showed up. From an NLP perspective, the preferences in the MB are but a limited selection of what we might refer to as meta programs. Just a selection, certainly not all, but some fairly important ones. One of the big differences for me, was the notion of how discreet individuals were, when it came to sharing personal information. Now some things come up in the course of discussions, and they can be quite personal, and yet some people could perfectly well describe what they wanted to say without the gory details, while others seemed incapable or perhaps it was more uninterested, in keeping their intimate details to themselves. Definitely, in some cases, to the point of Too Much Information.

Now of course, we have the issue of identity theft gaining purchase as an issue that needs to be managed, and discretion once again seems to be a useful mode of operation, and yet with the explosion of social media, we have more people than ever able to find out more about people they know (and some they don't know), than ever before. Twitter, Facebook, Business networks like Ryze and Linkedin and the networks that relate to them, means that there has never before been more opportunity to know more about people you may have seen somewhere, or heard of somehow, or are thinking of employing. For those seeking employment, or promoting a business who is not yet aware of how much information about them may be on the internet and just a Google search away, this is likely to come as a surprise!

For me, it comes down to this. Would I say the same thing in company? Fortunately, I am rather comfortable with speaking my mind no matter where I am and in what company. I can live with it if some people don't like my point of view, (or more commonly) don't understand it.

It must be a very sticky situation for those who like to keep different 'faces' for different people in their lives.