Oversharing with my Sister in Quarantine
My eldest sister and I don’t have the closest relationship; by the time I was in middle school, she was well into college, and afterward she moved to D.C., where I would only occasionally see her during the odd vacation or holiday which, at most, lasted two weeks. Come the global pandemic of COVID-19, and she is staying with my parents and I in our childhood home, and over the past several weeks we have gotten closer than we have in years. That said, for this experiment, I thought she would be the perfect candidate, for she is an avid use of social media and would definitely see my texts, messages, and posts (unlike my parents).
Experiment — I thought I would try “The Oversharer” for this experiment, as I thought it would fit well with the fact that I’ve been basically “undersharing” for years, because we haven’t been together or kept in that much touch for long. This would make the info I shared all the more perplexing in a massive dump, basically.
Method — What I did was, for a period between around 10am to 8pm (because an entire 24 hour period would be much too weird, even for me), I constantly messaged my sister about everything I was doing which included — but was not limited to — brushing my teeth, eating meals, finishing doing classwork, finishing classwork, complaining about how I was struggling with a particular piece of work but was vague enough that she wouldn’t be able to help, browsing Twitter, browsing Instagram, and going outside on a walk and finishing said walk. For the record, she and I were on the same walk with my parents, as we all normally walk together on nice days.
Results — Needless to say, my sister was stumped and confused. I messaged her that I was eating breakfast while in the same room as her, and she thought it was kind of funny, if a bit puzzling. When we were on the walk together and I was still messaging her gratuitously, she basically said “what’s going on?” to me, and all I said to her was “I’ll tell you later.” My final message was “good night” and her response was also “good night.” Funnily enough, that was the only message she sent back digitally. I later explained to her what I was doing, which gave her clarity for my odd behavior; she was essentially ignoring my messages regardless of the fact that we were stuck in quarantine together; she figured whatever she wanted to say, she could say to my face. I felt extremely uncomfortable with the entire process, seeing as every other say, I was contacting her face to face. A norm was developed, and I had essentially broken it. I was using Facebook Messenger specifically instead of just normal phone texts, because it seemed a bit more social media related.
Discussion — However, the norms were not in a vacuum, as Baym has stated. In this case, the norms of instant messaging are clear: you do not use them unless you are in a long distance from whoever you are contacting. This is an interesting case, because I have gotten texts from downstairs while I have been upstairs in my room, telling me to come down and join the company or grab some dinner before it gets cold. I thought when that happened, “why don’t they just come up here and tell me in person?” I realized it was the convenience of our technology to do so when we were occupied in an alternate space, so even our own rules of face to face and messaging online are skewed. I merely did it to an extreme extent, and the results were both predictable and fascinating.
