Tweet your meals, not your sex life

Sometimes Twitter leads to an uncomfortable titter

The rapid erosion of privacy in the modern age is being driven both by government agencies and corporations making our data and records increasingly available online, and by our intense need to share, overshare, and broadcast the details of our lives to anyone who will listen.

Like: I had steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast this morning. With blueberries and cashews. It was delicious. Sounds fancy, but I cheated and made it in the microwave — does that make me a bad person?

Do you care? Probably not. Yet it’s the kind of information likely to make its way onto my Facebook status or Twitter feed — except that message is way over the 140-character limit — if there’s nothing else of interest to report.

That’s fairly innocuous sharing. I don’t lose much in the way of privacy by revealing my morning breakfast routine. It’s also not all that compelling. Many of us social network broadcasters start revealing more personal, private stuff, presumably in order to engage our audience (a.k.a. those folks previously known as “our friends”).  When does the revealing cross the line, asks The San Francisco Chronicle.

Unlike face-to-face conversations, there’s really no good way yet for people to let one another know that they are being too revealing.

“The culture of broadcasting yourself to the world is still evolving,” [BJ Fogg, director of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab] said.

[Tara] Hunt’s policy is to never post anything online that is “NSFM,” or not safe for Mom. Her mother is an avid follower of her tweets, as Twitter posts are known, if only because they don’t talk often enough by telephone.

There have been times when Hunt considered posts on Twitter by other people to have gone too far – detailing sexual exploits and sharing bathroom humor.

Sharing your life online: How much is too much?.

If your friends are tweeting to the world about their scatological and erotic exploits, it might just be time to (Facebook) poke them, or send them a link to this post with the message, “Interesting.” They may need a little reminder that some conversations are best had offline.

In the meantime, I’ll stick to tweeting my oatmeal.