On December 1, Webster’s New World Dictionary announced “overshare” as 2008’s Word of the Year.
Former editor of Gawker.com, Emily Gould first popularized the word overshare in New York Times Magazine article- Exposed. That column sparked a massive public debate with a small army of bloggers trying to judge the value of intimate personal blogging.
View Emily Gould discussing the consequences of her oversharing and the massive reaction to her New York Times Magazine article in Digital Age interview Do Bloggers Overexpose Themselves?
Geekcentric’s Michael Duff refers to the battle between fans of artistic personal disclosure and the people who hate it, as ‘the overshare war’.
And posts this question … “where’s the line between sharing and oversharing? If I publish a detailed first-person account of a fight with my family in a novel, I can win awards and get touted in the New Yorker. If I do the same thing on a blog, I’ll be condemned as a narcissistic oversharing hack. What’s the difference?”
“Oversharing may look like a fad, but I believe it represents a larger cultural shift. The baseline of our public discourse is changing. Readers have grown suspicious of press releases and corporate doublespeak, particularly after what’s been done to our economy,” says Duff. Read The Overshare War
Watch Webster’s Editor-In-Chief Mike Agnes’s explanation of why ‘overshare’ was selected as word of the year, plus real life examples of oversharing and its consequences, from passersby in Washington Square Park, NYC.
Do you overshare?
We want to hear from you … leave a link in the comment box to an oversharing post. Do you undershare? What does that mean, I hear you think. If you share about what you had for breakfast, taking the kids to school, or any other snore material, you better let us know where you are!
