Grapevine Consulting

When i lived in Italy I visited the Benedictine monastery in Subiaco. It’s built around a cave where St Benedict supposedly lived in solitude for three years fed by a shepherd or monk (I’ve heard both versions) who lowered a basket of food down at intervals. The cave is surprisingly peacefully and, depending on your temperament, kind of appealing.

My positive response to the environment demonstrated that people feel different degrees of being intro- or extroverted and it’s something that crops up in questions when I run social media training sessions: who are ‘these people’ ie bloggers, tweeters, social networkers et al and why do *they* feel so comfortable broadcasting their lives?

I’m not sure I know the answer. At a basic level, once you and your friends start using something like Facebook it becomes more standardised and natural, you find yourself adding more personal updates, posting photos etc.

But honestly I still feel a bit like a social media “observer” using tools like this blog and Twitter to engage with my community from professional more than personal desires. As a pretty private person being publicly online makes me feel exposed and I contemplate deleting my accounts to run away to my Benedict’s cave. (Although I wonder if after 30 mins there I’d discover a compulsion to tweet “sitting in cave waiting for @Romanus to stop by with the food basket”).

I suspect that your level of comfort with publicly sharing is based on your confidence to allow people to make judgements about you. After all people can be nasty (See: Max’s Guardian blog or when Katie took on Fark)

There must be social anthropologists studying and categorising social media engagement types. But it’s intrinsic for humans to share at some level whether it’s online via blogging etc or offline via updating the people in your office with details of your love life. Only the mediums have diverged.

1000s of years ago when humans were creating cave drawings I wonder if they ever imagined their works would be seen outside of their small tribes.

How do you feel? Are you too shy to share?