I am in agreement with The Dane on this one, I really can’t think of a reason why we shouldn’t share a memory – that’s what these social networking sites are for! In my case, I have family all across America on Facebook and Twitter, and there is no way for me to keep in touch with all of them through pre-Twitter/Facebook means of communication (i.e.: phone calls or letters). However, through the power of Twitter/Facebook I can share my daily activities, updates on my life and the cute things that Ali does with all of them – at once! The ability to share and post our memories online has really brought me closer together with my family (and long-lost friends!) who I otherwise could not stay in touch with.

The Danes last blog post..20090417.teaParty

With regard to #1: That seems a judgment of valuation that I’m not comfortable making. Is there a reason that experiencing something for the sake of the experience is better than experiencing it for the sake of what it will mean to the larger body of others? Or is there a reason that weighting an experience in such a way trivializes the experience?

You’re careful to note that you mean can instead of will, but I’m not even sure how sharing a memory can trivialize it.

I do believe that there are such things as private matters, but I don’t believe that trivialization is the thing at stake in indiscriminately sharing those private experiences. Propriety and confidence come to mind, but trivialization is something I’m having a hard time seeing.

With regard to #2: It’s funny that you use my examples of unshackling experiences to share them broadly to show how I privatized those experiences. While its true that my wedding and birthday featured limited attendance, that wasn’t the case because of either desire for privacy or fear of trivializing important events in my life. More it was due to spacial and financial considerations. I would have been happy to have the state of California celebrate my 21st birthday and wedding, but that just wasn’t feasible.
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Basically, when I post pictures of something, this is the reason: Wow, here’s some pictures of something that’s important to me. If I put these up, then people who are interested in me can a) have their own related experience to the one I had (one that I was uniquely able to provide for them), thereby fostering closer relationship and community, and b) get to know me just a little bit clearer, thereby fostering closer relationship and community.

The Danes last blog post..20090417.teaParty

Good call on the tagging. I don’t think I was even aware that you could delete a tag that someone else had created for you.

@Dane
After all these years, can’t you just assume that I have good evidence behind my argument and leave it at that? Blah!

But seriously, I knowingly left out quite a bit of evidence and reasoning in this post since I wanted it to be a readable length rather than another one of my notorious two-part articles. Let me see if I can qualify and support my case here, briefly, so I can get back to other work:

First, let me point out that I said these memories can be trivialized, not that they must be necessarily, which is an important distinction. I suppose what I was trying to get at is that I am concerned that social networks encourage us to blur or even erase the distinction between public and private life. Most of us have a good understanding that it is important and valuable to have a private life which is shared by a select group of close friends and family. I think the examples you gave of sharing wedding photos (hundres of friends) and birthday photos (forty friends) reveals the point I was trying to get at. You understood that these were different events with varing levels of intimacy. For whatever reason, the wedding was more of a public event than your birthday, and so you acted accordingly online by limiting your friends exposure to the photos of these events. Likewise, the naming of your child was made into a game, since this name will be an incedibly public thing, whereas pictures of your child’s first birthday might be limited to only a select group of family and friends.

But I’m not sure that quite answers your call for evidence that the memories become trivialized. Let me try again:

1. It potentially trivializes them by shifting the priority from the experience itself to the anticipation of sharing the memories. As you point out, these are not mutually exclusive, which is why I would say that this is only a potential problem; however, insofar as any particular memory’s lasting impact comes through the amount of comments we receive on the posted pictures/video/note, our understanding of the importance and value of that memory and future memories will be altered so that we may conceive of the experience primarily in terms of its popularity. Now obviously I don’t want to overstate my case here; I certainly don’t believe that this trivialization will always occur or will necessarily have some disastorious effect on our culture, but neither do I want to underestimate this issue.

2. In those cases were we are undiscriminatingly posting “triggers” of our memories for the general public to see, we may trivialize them by failing to recognize the value of private experience. Again, this certainly does not apply to all events, but there are many experiences that we have that are valuable to us precisely because they are exclusive, or mostly exclusive experiences that we share with a select group of people. Again, I’d refer back to your examples of your wedding and your birthday party. With these events in particular, the act of posting pictures only for all to see trivializes the memory by turning what was an exclusive, unique experience into a public display.

Does that help?

Finally, social networking sites can trivialize our memories and experiences by undiscriminatingly displaying them for all our friends, and perhaps even the Internet public in general to see.

I call Baloney on this. You fail to demonstrate how others seeing a photo or having knowledge of an event trivializes your participation (or memory of participation) in the event. You must have some reason for believing this to be the case, but if there are reason to support this view, they aren’t exactly intuitive.

You seem to create a false dichotomy, pitting having memory of an event against sharing memory of an event. These, it seems to me, neither are mutually exclusive nor does one impinge on the value of the other. Was my wedding trivialized by the act of sharing it with two-hundred friends? If anything, it was enriched. Was my twenty-first birthday trivialized by the act of sharing it with forty of my closest friends? Nope, that magnified the event. Was our final decision as to what we would name our first child diminished by sharing that name (and more, making a game of it)? Not hardly.

I think you’ve got a tough row to hoe here, Alan, but I’m interested to see if you can demonstrate how your fear here is reasonable.

(Plus, it should be said that the photo is not the memory but merely an possible trigger to the memory. Therefore, when sharing photos, you are not sharing memories but triggers. You may expand to relate some sense of the memory by explaining what the trigger means to you, but photos don’t have the same meaning to others as they do to you.)

The Danes last blog post..20090417.teaParty

My profile is very public for several reasons, but I make a habit of checking who has tagged me in pictures (and deleting those tags), what is posted to my wall, and cleaning it all up periodically. :)

Corinnes last blog post..It’s Question Time!