I just finished reading the book “Dag vriend!” (Hi/bye, friend!) from Stine Jensen. It’s very inspiring! She looks at the concept of friendships from various perspectives. One of the perspectives is social media and Facebook. At Facebook, we share with dozens (and potentially millions) of people what we used to share with our best friend only.
All the stuff that you don’t want others to know about you, that’s your intimate capital or your intimate treasure. And how more famous you are, how more people and press will desire to know all about you. Look at what happened to Rihanna last year, when she put a picture of herself on twitter. On the photo she was stepping into the train from London to Paris. The departure time was on the photo too, so in Paris thousands of fans waited for her. She didn’t anticipate on that and got angry with her fans.
How more you hide, how more the press will be after you. Journalists will act like friends in order to get some intimate information from you. They will publish it to make a name, to raise the sale of the tabloid, newspaper, etc. You can also put everything into the open, until people get bored of you. That’s probably not what you are looking for either.
So why is there this haunt for our intimate treasures? Facebook actually is nothing else than us, playing pimp, prostitute and whore runner at the same time. We love to read the mishaps of others and in return we love to share our own, preferably accompanied by a picture.
Please don’t think that you don’t have anything to hide. We all have stuff we want to hide. It starts with simple things like picking our nose. You certainly don’t want a picture of that online! Than there are other odd habits that we might be ashamed of, like eating the wrong food, reading the wrong books, visiting the wrong people. We usually don’t want our diseases like athlete’s foot to be public either. I’m sure you know more than this, once you start thinking. It’s important to be aware of what we do and what we don’t want to share. The information shared on social media can’t be taken back again.
The run for the intimate treasure of others made me think of a quote of Eleanor Roosevelt: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” It seems that we are more and more tempted to discuss people all the time. Maybe it’s time to start to discuss events and idea’s again, also on Facebook 🙂