Full Disclosure: Why We Say Too Much When We Write

Online
daily.jstor.org /full-disclosure-say-much-write-online/

The internet is an emotional vampire.

Scroll through your latest social network updatesor the headlines on Medium and other
blogging sitesand youll find countless stories in which authors have vomited up their
most traumatic experiences, private thoughts, or personal struggles, from alcoholic
dissipation to intense anxiety to surviving cancer.

The internet rewards these personal disclosures with attention, shares, and conversation
(though that conversation can be critical or even downright cruel). In an online ecosystem
in which there is ever more competition for clicks, theres a strong incentive to mine our
pain and personal relationships in order to come up with the next viral story.

Its a temptation I have often yielded to myselfparticularly in the

past year, in which Ive started to write about my experience
raising an autistic son. As a chronic over-discloser, my tendency to
process my feelings by puking them up in front of random
strangers aligns quite nicely with the way social media feeds on
emotional pain.

Most of our online experiences cue us for over-disclosure.

In her biweekly column
The Digital Voyage,
But Im increasingly concerned that in its hunger for intimate Alexandra Samuel
human stories, the internet is transforming disclosure into a literary investigates the key
psychological, social, and
imperative. Those of us who were once prone to keeping our own practical challenges of
counsel may find our stories pried out of us by eager editors migrating to an online
world.
hungry for page views. Those who already shared a goodly
amount of our secrets are encouraged to share even more. That
pressure stems both from the culture of the early social web, and the specific
characteristics of todays blogging platforms.

Over-disclosure and the birth of the social web

In her article, Blogging Infertility, Cheryl Miller neatly sums up the dilemma of todays
bloggers:

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 [T]he openness and transparency encouraged by the Internet pose new
challenges, particularly for something as intimate as human reproduction.
Allowing the world to read aboutand comment onyour political opinions
is one thing. Allowing the world a front-row seat to witness your struggles to
conceive is another. The blogospheres much-heralded opportunity for
connection and expression, over time and amid the cacophony of
competing voices, can lead to a form of leveling that risks rendering even
the most serious topics banal. And the mediums encouragement of self-
exposure can transform private pain into voyeurism.

That voyeurism is enabled by the speed with which online story-sharing has transformed
from a small group activity to a public forum. Writing only five years ago, Aime Morrison
was able to describe mommy blogging as a community of tight reciprocal networks of
writer-readers built from and maintained through interlinked individual sites of textual
production. Mommy blogging was more conversation that publication, she argued,
because

the communities generated through personal mommy blogging are

deliberately small in scale;these blogging texts circulate according to
network rather than broadcast theories of transmission, and this distinction
alters the relationships between members of this public, as well as their
relations to the texts that frame their communities.

I well remember this kind of intimacy on early blogs and online communities, in which the
confessional nature of many posts reflected our sense that we were speaking to a small,
connected community of readers. As social media turned mainstream and blogging
audiences grew, bloggers like me may have known that we were no longer speaking to a
closed circlebut the changing nature of the web made our continued over-disclosure
more likely, not less.

Usability feeds over-disclosure

The role of contemporary websites in fostering a culture of over-disclosure is crystallized

in Alter and Oppenheimers article, Suppressing Secrecy Through Metacognitive Ease.
Through a series of experiments and analyses, the two psychologists investigate the role
of fluency, which they define as the metacognitive experience of ease or difficulty
associated with processing information, in shaping the level of personal information
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people are willing to disclose. They present several layers of evidence for the idea that
self-disclosure is influenced by the usability of an interface, whether that interface is in
print

In the first study, participants completed a social-desirability scale, which

measured their willingness to disclose socially undesirable thoughts and
behaviors. To examine the effects of fluency on self-disclosure, we
presented the scale to participants in either a clear font or a difficult-to-read
font Participants tended to choose a greater percentage of socially
desirable, nondisclosing responses when the SDS was printed in the
difficult-to-read font.

or on a screen:

Grouphug (http://www.grouphug.us) is an anonymous on-line community in

which people disclose personal secrets to other readers, who
correspondingly issue virtual hugs. In August 2008, the sites creator
elected to change the sites background from black to white, which
rendered the site substantially easier to read. To extend the results from
our lab studies, we examined whether users confessions disclosed more
information when the site adopted its new, easier-to-read
format.Confessors tended to disclose more embarrassing information in
the fluent condition than in the disfluent condition.

Alter and Oppenheimer suggest that [g]iven the importance of eliciting self-disclosure in
many contexts, physicians, Web designers, and health care practitioners might benefit
from fluency-based interventions. But they also note that given the rise of the Internet
and the proliferation of privacy-violating crimes like identity theft, internet-security
programs might strategically include disfluency to deter people from too readily disclosing
private information.

The problem we have on the Web today, I would argue, is that usability has become
so good that it lends itself to the kind of metacognitive ease Alter and Oppenheimer
describe. Most of our online experiences cue us for over-disclosurebeginning with the
worlds most widely-used social network, as Schoon and Cain describe:

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 The default privacy settings on Facebook allow for maximum exposure,
and its not unreasonable to think that, in the absence of shared
knowledge, the boundary between public and private becomes all the more
difficult to set.

Or as Julie Cohen puts it:

There are many reasons that one might prefer not to share information
about all of ones purchases or all of ones private correspondence with all
of ones friends. The designers of Facebook Beacon and Google Buzz
betrayed a fatal insensitivity to the fine contextual distinctions that we make
all the time in our interactions with the world, and to our reasons for making
them.

If both the culture and the interfaces of the social web are subtly (and not so subtly)
herding us towards over-disclosure, how can we safeguard both emotional health and
authentic expression? As it turns out, this isnt an entirely new problem.

Personal narrative: literary genre or therapy?

For years, composition teachers and English professors have struggled with the kinds of
intimate disclosure that are often catalyzed by classroom writing, and struggled with how
to draw the line between writing instruction and personal therapy.

Had we all been sucked into the self-indulgence vortex, eagerly fulfilling our desires for
expression, approval, and entertainment? Megan Brown wonders, in an article about
teaching personal narrative. As an instructor of an autobiography course, I have
frequently found myself wondering if I am somehow compelling students to disclose their
feelings and experiences to me, the judge and jury, the instructor-therapist.

In her thoughtful article on healing writing, Wendy Ryden contrasts the idea that writing
heals because it is a way to get it off your chest, with the reality that students seek out
the writing classroom to enact personal narratives with some degree of publicity. Yet
seeking out an audience poses risks

due to the dynamics of confessional discourse that hover over the

production of the personal and threaten to in-authenticate it through
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 coercive demands for that production. Thus, we have talk-show and reality
TV-styled performances that require a handing over of the subjects story to
exploitive rules of genre in order to earn the audiences acknowledgment or
absolution.In a sense, one must buy the audience with the currency of
ones story, and ones story is then in turn bought by the larger commercial
apparatus governing the event. Such commodification cedes power for the
experiences definition to a consuming audience rapaciously feeding on the
fodder of others traumas and intimacies.

Ryden argues that the solution lies in a hard-working audience whose role may
nonetheless be defined largely by itsattentive presence.

But not every writer can assume that sort of thoughtful, attentive readership, observes
Anne Ruggles Gere:

As Hannah Arendt has observed, some experiences cannot withstand the

glare of public light without being extinguished (123), and many students
who feel marginalized by their color, sexual orientation, traumatic
experience, or some other factor may be unable to share their experiences.
The light of sharing personal writing on such topics would, they know
instinctively, extinguish some part of them forever. The challenge for
composition teachers is to recognize and respect students need for
silence, to resist a voice like Freuds that argues I shall have to hear it
when another says I prefer not to tell you.

As both a literary and therapeutic genre, personal narrative needs to be carefully handled.
Writers need be thoughtful about their own balance of literary and healing aspirations, and
whether or not an audience is essential or even conducive to their mental health.

But the Internet makes that kind of reflection difficult, since it has little room for the kind of
powerful silence Gere advocates: as a medium that too-often seems to favor those who
shout loudest and most often, it hardly encourages us to hold back.

Writing and reading on the wide-open web

All of us can extract a few useful insights from the ongoing conversation about personal
narrative in the classroom; the work here isnt for writers alone. The kind of audience
Wendy Ryden describesthe hard-working, attentive readerswell, thats the kind of
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online consumer each of us should aspire to be. For better and for worse, we have
collectively created a medium that evokes extraordinary levels of personal disclosure, and
if tweets and Facebook likes are any indication, we clearly want more and more of it. The
least we can do as readers is to rise to the occasion, and meet those writers with the
kindness their vulnerability deserves.

But it is as writers that we most need to engage with the Internets pressures for over-
disclosure, and to marshall the insights of the writing classroom. If you ever post personal
news or reflections onlinewhether as a blog post, Facebook update or tweetthen you
may benefit from asking yourself the three specific questions suggested by the literature
on the boundary between writing and healing:

1. Is it safe for me to share this piece? Or is silence going to serve me better?

2. Am I writing this as part of a healing process? If so, how do I expect writing will
help me heal?
3. Do I need an audience in order to catalyze that healing process? If so, how do I
reach that audienceand only that audience?

These are questions I have learned to ask of my own writing, not only as it affects my
well-being, but as it affects my sons. To get an honest answer, I have to turn off the
portion of my brain that obsesses over social media analytics, so that I dont let the
prospect of abundant page views overwhelm my self-care instincts. I use multiple
Facebook lists, and target certain kinds of posts very narrowly, so they only reach the
people with whom I am ready to share this specific post. And when I feel tender about a
particular story I am committed to posting publicly, I try to pay attention to the comments
that thank me for sharing, and to skim past the jabs aimed at my soft underbelly.

As with so many online practices, this has spillover benefits that affect my offline life too.
That inner voice Im told some people are born withthe voice that asks do you actually
want to say this? before you open your mouthwell, its starting to get a little louder. Far
from exacerbating my chronic over-disclosure, learning to think before I write online is
teaching me to think before I talk offline. If you want to know how that has changed me,
and what it says about the childhood traumas that made me so extroverted in the first
placewell, Im sure Ill be over-disclosing soon.

JSTOR Citations

Blogging Infertility

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By: Cheryl Miller

The New Atlantis, No. 19 (Winter 2008), pp. 79-90

Center for the Study of Technology and Society

"SUFFUSED BY FEELING AND AFFECT": THE INTIMATE PUBLIC OF

PERSONAL MOMMY BLOGGING

By: AIME MORRISON

Biography, Vol. 34, No. 1, LIFE WRITING & INTIMATE PUBLICS (winter 2011), pp. 37-55

University of Hawai'i Press

Suppressing Secrecy Through Metacognitive Ease: Cognitive Fluency

Encourages Self-Disclosure

By: Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer

Psychological Science, Vol. 20, No. 11 (November 2009), pp. 1414-1420

Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Association for Psychological Science

facebook's boundaries

By: eric schoon and cindy I. cain

Contexts, Vol. 10, No. 2, big ideas, stubborn realities (SPRING 2011), pp. 70-71

Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the American Sociological Association

The Inverse Relationship between Secrecy and Privacy

By: Julie E. Cohen

Social Research, Vol. 77, No. 3, Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy (FALL 2010), pp.
883-898

The New School

The Memoir as Provocation: A Case for "Me Studies" in Undergraduate

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Classes

By: Megan Brown

College Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Summer 2010), pp. 121-142

The Johns Hopkins University Press

From Purgation to Recognition: Catharsis and the Dialectic of Public

and Private in Healing Writing

By: Wendy Ryden

JAC, Vol. 30, No. 1/2 (2010), pp. 239-267

JAC

Revealing Silence: Rethinking Personal Writing

By: Anne Ruggles Gere

College Composition and Communication, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Dec., 2001), pp. 203-223

National Council of Teachers of English

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