Am I being selfish if I do not want to share the details of the day’s activities, some music I liked or my opinions about the sandwich I just bought? This is now called “sharing” but it seems more like boring the hell out of friends and strangers, while wasting a hell of a lot of time.
But maybe I should be more willing to share. I’m on the fence.
No, I’ll share this right now … I don’t want to share.
What I want is for everything in my digital life to once again assume that I don’t want to share and won’t want to share anything, ever.
Of course Facebook is the citadel of sharing and I was once ready to take the leap into the world of greater sharing. Sitting around joking one night about how my wife, her father and I were all checking our various iDevices, I thought it would be funny to send a friend request to them both while sitting in the same room. Call it a lame attempt at irony … the joke was on me.
The Facebook App put a “Share with all your Contacts” button right next to the button I meant to press and within two seconds I was sending “friend requests” to everyone in my phone’s address book. My accountant, plumber, insurance company, ex-wife, a few people who had passed away and a lot of people I barely know started to get those damn messages from me!
I did a shutdown on the phone as quick as possible while becoming the best joke of the evening for my self-imposed predicament. Nobody enjoys a good embarrassing screwup like that better than one’s family! Needless to say I cancelled that account and have been quite a bit more restrained exposing digital irony since then.
