When we can share everything online, what counts as oversharing?

I recently made a new friend, and we became Instagram mutuals right away. From her posts, I’m getting a sense of what she does on the weekends and what she likes to cook. It’s helping me to get to know her even though we don’t see each other very often.

As I learned about her hobbies and how many brothers she has, I also noticed how much the act of sharing personal details has evolved. The photos or thoughts I casually put online without a second thought might once have been considered too much to broadcast. Who needs to know what I’m buying at the farmer’s market or how long I waited for the subway? But none of my friends or followers bat an eye, and they share similarly – if not more – about their activities too.

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It’s clear that what is considered oversharing has changed. How much of our lives do we have to share to reach that point?

Last year, a paper from Psychological Reports published the first psychological scale to measure oversharing. The researchers gave a questionnaire to teenagers that asked how much of their thoughts, emotions and personal life events they put online. They suggested that not only is oversharing still a thing, but that there might be some troubling psychological states affiliated with sharing too much. The findings raise questions about why we post about our lives at all, and how we might define oversharing in a digital age.

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One definition of oversharing put forward by a 2012 psychology paper is that it’s an “excessive generosity with information about one’s private life or the private lives of others”. Of course, what’s considered “excessive” is open to interpretation. If something is considered a share versus an overshare, that’s nearly always going to be a subjective evaluation that depends on what’s considered normal in certain eras or contexts. Influencers, for example, share a lot because they’re getting paid to do so.

But with the internet, non-influencers gained more spaces to share, and overshare, in.

The ways and amount people share online can diverge from their offline lives. The sociologist Ben Agger wrote in the book Oversharing: Presentations of Self in the Internet Age that a person oversharing online is divulging “more of their inner feelings, opinions, and sexuality than they would in person, or even over the phone”.

Online, “there is almost nothing that cannot be shared,” said Reza Shabahang, a psychologist at the University of Tehran, and first author of the oversharing scale study.

To learn more about how people share online, Shabahang and his colleagues asked 352 teenagers in Iran to say how often they posted their feelings, opinions and values on social media. Then, the researchers asked if the teens enjoyed sharing this information, how much they posted about their personal lives, and if they thought there was anything “too personal” to disclose online. Teens who shared a lot online had higher levels of anxiety and attention-seeking tendencies. These teens also reported feeling higher levels of worry and an excessive attachment to social media, and many had an “intense urge to post”.

Oversharing comes in many forms, like “sadfishing”, or negative online sharing with the goal of seeking sympathy. In 2023, Shabahang and colleagues developed a Social Media Sadfishing Questionnaire and found that this behavior was also associated with anxiety, depression and attention seeking. This is in line with another study from 2018, which found people who had higher social anxiety were more likely to engage in what the authors called “toxic self-disclosure”, or online disclosures that have negative effects such as isolation or cyberbullying, or negative mental health effects.

But there’s an element to oversharing that isn’t just about frequency or content. I wouldn’t blink at a close friend posting something very personal to her private stories, for example, and we all know from experience that sharing online can bring you closer to people and communities, rather than only having negative effects. It seems like there’s something else that makes a post come across and act as an overshare.

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The oversharing scale from Shabahang and his colleagues is based on a psychological concept from 1973 called social penetration theory (SPT), from Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor.

Altman and Taylor thought that “self-disclosure” was critical to how people develop relationships; as time goes on, people disclose more personal information with one another. In SPT, there are two ways to self-disclose: with breadth, the number of topics you share about; and with depth, how deep you go on one topic. Breadth usually comes first, then depth.

Too much – or too little – sharing can stop a relationship in its tracks. “You want your level of intimacy to be sort of the same,” said Emmelyn Croes, an assistant professor at Tilburg University who studies how people get to know each other through communication technologies. “You don’t want to share very intimate details when someone does not reciprocate.” Conversely, sharing works optimally when we reciprocally share information in similar ways and that back-and-forth inspires us to become closer.

There’s more to it than, say, an objective daily count. If a person posts more or less than you, or what you believe is appropriate, you could feel like the poster is oversharing or undersharing. But another person may not agree, depending on their own opinions and practices.

Practices also evolve with time, meaning what’s considered “too much” can change, and there’s also potentially significant cultural variation. Croes has been studying “momfluencers”, who have become less accepting about publishing information or photos of children online. This flexibility means there could be cases in which oversharing is seen as more authentic, or better for relationships, compared to a carefully understated social presence. Last year, some Instagram users called to “make Instagram casual again”, preferring less stylized “photo dumps” over single, beautifully shot photos.

Algorithms make it more complicated, said Aparajita Bhandari, a critical media researcher at the University of Waterloo, because a person cannot fully control who their content is shown to. Because of social media’s recommendation systems, your content could be shared with people that you don’t know. “Those boundaries of personal versus public are shifted in these new spaces that we’re in,” Bhandari said.

I asked my younger sister, who is 23, about her and her friends’ thoughts on oversharing online. She agreed that it’s nuanced: they all have multiple accounts on different platforms. On Instagram, it’s common to have private, public and spam accounts. It’s frowned upon to overshare on your main account – that is where carefully selected photos live. Private or spam accounts are for posting more with less judgment from others, and with that reciprocity of oversharing built in.

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Oversharing can come with negative mental side effects because it can influence actual life experiences, Shabahang said. For example, at a gathering, a person “might become engrossed in taking a good picture” for social media, Shabahang said. “Then they lose the real pleasure of spending time with their friend.”

Yet disclosing information about ourselves is part of how we communicate who we are. The sociologist Erving Goffman argued in his influential book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life that presenting ourselves to other people is a process of impression management; sharing is a way to control what and how others think about us.

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So sharing online isn’t a bad thing: when interacting in person or online, people seek to learn about each other. It’s not just nosiness: this information helps define what people can expect from one another, and what their relationship will be. Goffman called these sources of information “sign vehicles”; they include the setting where you meet someone, their appearance, how they interact with you. We can add social media accounts to that list.

I asked a friend who doesn’t have social media accounts if there are any downsides to being offline. She said she does sometimes feel left out of the loop of big life events like births and deaths. But her friend who recently had a daughter sent an email to people who weren’t on social media so that they could hear the news. “I found that very touching,” she said.

Goffman wrote that just like a play involves a stage and a backstage, social life does, too. The front is where the actor performs, and backstage is where they prepare for the role. It’s easy to apply these thoughts to the internet and social media: the internet is the stage where we present our activities and thoughts, and backstage is offline. Spend too much time in either place, and you might miss out.