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Social Scientist And Author Sherry Turkle

Good Essays

“When it comes to posting things on the Internet, it seems anyone and everyone is susceptible to oversharing. There’s apparently something alluring about filling those empty white boxes with embarrassing anecdotes—anecdotes that BuzzFeed then compiles and publishes in list form for everyone else to laugh at. Plus, judging by humor sites such as Lamebook, there doesn’t appear to be a scarcity of material to draw from, either. Even criminals can’t resist revealing incriminating evidence about themselves sometimes, and thus examples of TMI abound online. But why? What compels us to tell the world with our fingers what we’d hesitate to utter in a room full of loved ones? Social scientist and author Sherry Turkle thinks we’re losing a healthy …show more content…

Through Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube, whose former slogan was “Broadcast Yourself,” we construct our identities in a manner that has never before been possible. “When we’re looking at the screen we’re not face-to-face with someone who can immediately respond to us, so it’s easier to let it all out—it’s almost like we’re invisible,” said Belk, of the so-called “disinhibition effect” that online sharing helps create. “The irony is that rather than just one person, there’s potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands of people receiving what we put out there.” As for the consequences of these actions, Belk writes: “The resulting disinhibition leads many to conclude that they are able to express their “true self” better online than they ever could in face-to-face contexts. This does not mean that there is a fixed “true self” or that the self is anything other than a work in progress, but apparently self-revelation can be therapeutic, at least with the aid of self-reflexive applications.” Just as a psychoanalyst’s couch or Catholic confessional booth are settings in which we can sort out the details of who we are by divulging our innermost secrets to someone without staring directly at him, Belk believes these sorts of exchanges are migrating onto the Internet: [It appears] that we now do a large amount of

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