I totally agree with the premise, but (there's always a but) attitude and happiness can be manufactured artificially. So, if sharing on twitter/facebook help me to see where ever I am in the here and now in a more positive light. then the fact that I'm sharing is forcing me to look at it positively which then is in turn making the experience more happy and memorable. Hypothetically speaking. There's some assumptions there.
Stop externalising your life
101–110 of 160 posts
Re: Stop externalising your life
#102Many people have heard the phrase "conspicuous consumption", but it's only half of Veblen's analysis. It counterpart, "conspicuous leisure", is arguably at least as important. Typical social proof that you're doing well is not just buying a BMW, but also showing that you didn't have to work hard for it. This is communicated most effectively by advertising the time you can afford to spend on non-economic activities: tourism, cooking, amateur photography etc. There are, of course, many other good reasons to engage in these pastimes. But their importance as a means of social display should not be underestimated.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#103>What were people actually saying by Tweeting about their visit?
They are telling others about their life experiences. It's called communication, we do it in real life all the time, why can't we do it online? If somebody told you what they did on the weekend, do you respond "you are fulfilling your obligation to have to share"?
Re: Stop externalising your life
#104"you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focussed on making them look attractive to other people." Humans are social animals. Everything we do is focused on making ourselves look attractive to other people. People who don't do this are typically not liked by others. The fact that most people do the behaviors the author describes and yet a…
I don't think the author is against sharing in general. It seems to me he is trying to say there is a time and place for sharing, and that is not during the event itself. Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression from the post. Anyway, this is why I don't find the post as ironic as you do: clearly this post wasn't written while he was visiting Singapore.
Second, I don't necessarily believe the "humans are social animals" argument. I completely agree with you about that fact. But that doesn't mean it is good for us to try and make ourselves look attractive to other people, or that it makes us happy. I tend to think of it more as a drive or an itch. We don't receive happiness in the act of posting things on twitter (modulo the excitement that comes from anticipating for acknowledgement), but we "scratch the itch" when we get recognition. Is that scratching worth being dissociated with what is going around you? I don't really know, maybe it is for different people. In either case, arguing that posting to twitter is fine because "thats what people do" doesn't seem very satisfying to me.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the reasons that I got into photography is that I found that people around me were doing a piss-poor job of capturing those "important moments" (especially the important moments of my own life). So at many events with friends, my presence with a camera lets other people keep their phones in their pockets to enjoy the experience while I'm the one capturing it. And it's a really cool experience to upload an albu…
Very cool. That's a great example of useful and personal interaction resulting from you being the capturer of content and experiences. But let's not blow it out of proportion. I think that for as long as cameras have existed and been in the hands of the public (which is what, over 70 years now realistically?) there have been horrible, horrible photographers. The fact that it's easy to see everyone's horrible photogra…
It's pretty clear that imagery has gotten very popular these days, and I think it has become a very important part of our lives because of these huge platforms for broadcasting and sharing them. Good photos aren't just for "professional" personal branding but also for casual identity. A great photo of something boring can often get more attention than a bad photo of something awesome. And events with well-documented professional-looking photos are sometimes seen as far bigger and more impressive events than ones with more people but fewer photos. I was kind of shocked to go to a huge computing conference lately and see people taking official photos who were pretty clearly amateurs in the photography world.
And it's important to mention that you don't need to be a professional photographer to provide value to your social circle or area, you just need to take better photos than the people around you... which might not be as difficult as it sounds. You just need a passion for it.
Many photographers are ticked off by the rise of instagram and mobile phone cameras, but I'm glad that the world is getting interested in photography and seeing the value in good photos. It encourages them to learn how to get better photos out of their devices, whether it's instagram or their new DSLR. To me it means that those important moments will be captured. Even with 20+ people with cameras, everyone can miss a split-second opportunity, unless they are talented and anticipating the moment. Better skills, technology, and distribution channels allow those moments to be captured.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#106>What were people actually saying by Tweeting about their visit? They are telling others about their life experiences. It's called communication, we do it in real life all the time, why can't we do it online? If somebody told you what they did on the weekend, do you respond "you are fulfilling your obligation to have to share"?
The crux of the argument seems to be the time and place of sharing. Before the advent of social media, sharing used to happen after the event. Now, it happens during it. The author doesn't seem like he is against sharing in general, just the sharing that interferes with the sensory experience of the event itself.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can think of several reasons: 1. It would be insulting to do that. 2. Most people understand that as long as the flow of conversation is maintained, it doesn't really matter what else you're doing. People have conversations while doing other things all the time. 3. Doing something else while conversing with someone doesn't actually mean you're less interesting than that something else. It means that temporarily, th…
> 1. It would be insulting to do that. It's also insulting to not give a conversation your full attention, for some of us. If I'm trying to talk with you about something (as opposed to talking to you), I'm going to be insulted if you're checking your phone and otherwise broadcasting through body language and your inattention that "what you're saying to me right now is unimportant, and I would rather be doing other th…
>> "It's also insulting to not give a conversation your full attention, for some of us."
There are certain mental conditions (including variants of ADHD) wherein it's actually easier for someone to focus if they're doing two things than if they're doing one thing.
It's insulting to those of us with those conditions to be told to stop because you misunderstand us.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#108Externalizing isn't just pictures. It's words, as well. They are often more powerful than pictures, when in the right hands. I find it a bit amusing that the OP externalized his trip in an article about how people shouldn't externalize--describing not just where he was ( Singapore! ), but how long he was there ( a whole month! ), the food ( exotic! ), sights ( there were so many! ), and his reasoning, as well ( to im…
Well, the author was making a point about the way people interact with their omnipresent tweetdeck/camera device. He was painting a picture for the sake of making a point, not for the sake of "hey, I'm in Singapore".
> He was painting a picture ...
Exactly. Stop there. The irony is that he did exactly what he was complaining about, but in words, not pictures. He apparently missed the part where that is externalizing his life. I'm more careful than you to eschew attributing intentionality, but the effect is the same--he externalized his life via a blog post that decried externalizing one's life.
It's all about words. If he'd been more mindful, he could have written everything in that paragraph with less-externalizing language--no mention of where he was, what he did, how long he was there, etc. But it's much more difficult to hit the point of non-externalizing language.
We're always externalizing our lives, irregardless of medium.
More importantly, though, the OP's point is just weak. He commits fundamental attribution errors and compounds it with fallacious mind projections. He sees errant personality traits in [over]sharers where context and circumstance might hold greater explanatory power. He assesses his own behavior and intentions, then projects that onto the Reality of Others, as if he's grasped the fundamental psychological happenings of all the millions of people who [over]share. It's useless nonsense. He ignores the complexities inherent to human terminal and instrumental values, as if he possesses the acumen to tease them out in a few hundred words. Values are complex, nuanced objects. He sweeps everything about sharing one's experiences into a simplistic and negative You're externalizing your life. Stop it!
Externalizing one's life is not an intrinsic negative. Sure, there's a lot of stuff people share that I might find useless. But that's a measure of my value judgments, not theirs.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#109"you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focussed on making them look attractive to other people." Humans are social animals. Everything we do is focused on making ourselves look attractive to other people. People who don't do this are typically not liked by others. The fact that most people do the behaviors the author describes and yet a…
I agree. The author identifies a near universal human behavior and his reaction is to condemn it as tearing apart human society. I don't think so. More like it speaks to something deeply ingrained in our nature, something we evolved because it was beneficial to survival.
It's definitely a deep part of the human psyche. Though I can see space for arguing that social media is too effective.
Our social instincts aren't structured to process detailed updates from thousands of people, nor to broadcast our personal moments to them. I suspect that much of the frustration that people feel is by getting hit with hundreds of updates in the volume that would normally only be shared with very close friends. It comes off as narcissist, because narcissists are the kind of people who can't read the social cues to stop sharing that information--but the social web also lacks the cues that create inhibition.
In fact, because you only get delayed feedback, people lack the social cues that usually get them to stop. And then when the feedback happens, they get a socially-reinforcing signal, separated from the original impulse.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#110When I attempt to curate the capturing of an experience, it is normally for myself later in life to be able to look back on the event. I may share my experiences on occasion, but my efforts in capturing these things are rarely for the sake of others.