I didn’t share.

Yesterday I went to the third Red Sox game of the season at Fenway Park. It was a glorious night. The day prior a dubious sellout streak had ended at 830 games. The organization had finally decided to give up their clever accounting and accept the fact that fewer people would be attending games after two years of disappointment and juvenile behavior by the Sox on and off the field.

What happened at the ballpark last night was not nearly as interesting as what didn’t happen on my phone. For some reason, last night I did not share. I posted no Facebook statuses, I didn’t tweet and I didn’t even Instagram (I took one photo, seen above).

None of this was a conscious decision on my part but looking back it feels really good.Why do people need to know that I’m at a Red Sox game? Why do I care if they know? Why do so many of us now have the immediate impulse to share what we are doing so often in our lives with people that it does not effect?

“Facebook makes it way too easy to compare your behind-the-scenes footage against someone else's highlight reel.” - Jeff Clark

I think part of the reason lies in the fact that, as Jeff so elegantly phrased on HN, we feel compelled to show our social connections that we are also doing interesting things. We aren’t sitting at home watching paint dry (or on Facebook) while they go party with rock stars, get funding, or travel around the world. This is what Facebook and other social sites rely on; our insecurities, however unconscious, that compel us to show others that we are also doing interesting things with our lives.

Keeping up with the Joneses

When this idiom became part of the cultural lexicon we could only compare ourselves to our neighbors. These were the people that lived next door to us. Nowadays I rarely see my neighbors in my apartment building and I have no clue what lives they lead or how mine compares. What we now see is what is online.

Facebook has become the fence that everyone is more than welcome to peak over. The interesting part is that we can only peek over when our virtual neighbors want us to (or when the privacy policies change our settings without warning). With algorithms that decide what displays in our news feed we are being served exactly what Facebook and other social networks believe will cause the most reaction. You could probably argue that Facebook drives conspicuous consumption more effectively than anything else.

I didn’t share at the Red Sox game. I’m still alive. My friends still like me. There is life outside of the highlight reel and it can be just as fulfilling.

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