Near-Earth Object

a weblog by Paul Fidalgo

Internalizing vs. “Sharing”

James Shakespeare on social media, which he calls “the curse of our age”:

The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focused on making them look attractive to other people. Your experience of something, even if similar to the experience of many others, is unique and cannot be reproduced within the constraints of social media. So internalise that experience instead. Think about it. Go home and think about it some more. Write about it in more than 140 characters; on paper even. Paint a picture of it. Talk about it face to face with your friends. Talk about how it made you feel.

And then put those feelings on your blog and share the post on Facebook and Twitter and Google+ and OH GOD HELP I CAN’T STOP!

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Paul Fidalgo

Responses

  1. Stacy Avatar
    Stacy

    He’s full of shit. The people I know IRL don’t present themselves differently on social media. Many of us are tempted to try and make our experiences “look attractive to other people”, that comes with being a social animal; does he think that doesn’t happen in meatspace? We can decline to do, or indulge it, but there isn’t something inherent in “social media” that turns everyone who uses it into a shallow narcissist. That’s magical thinking.
    The authors and subjects using these new media are still human beings.

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  2. brucegee1962 Avatar
    brucegee1962

    I’ve got to agree with him on the 140 characters thing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quoted from Twitter that has made me think it’s contributed anything of value to human discourse.

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  3. =8)-DX Avatar
    =8)-DX

    The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focused on making them look attractive to other people

    What a silly person. I’ll explain this as if he was a 6-year-old:
    You enrich your life through the experiences other people share online. You yourself sharing experiences is more of a way of relieving stress, or the kind of expressive fun one gets trying to describe a mood or experience through a few short sentences, a picture, photo, song, video…
    It’s like saying “But by writing a book about travelling to Italy I don’t enrich my experience of Italy, writing the book doesn’t tell me anything about France!” Thank Akhn-Aton that most people aren’t as socially selfish as Mr. Shakespeare here, why I for instance can spend hours babbling about my opinions and experiences to hapless semi-strangers in the pub and mind not a whit that all I’m gaining in the process is the experience of expressing myself. What I gain is when I listen to their experiences and opinions back. Duh.

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