My must read of the day is "A Memoir Is Not a Status Update," by Dani Shapiro, in the New Yorker:
I can’t tell you how many times people have thanked me for "sharing my story," as if the books I’ve written are not chiseled and honed out of the hard and unforgiving material of a life but, rather, have been dashed off, as if a status update, a response to the question at the top of every Facebook feed: "What’s on your mind?" I haven’t shared my story, I want to tell them. I haven’t unburdened myself, or softly and earnestly confessed. Quite the opposite. In order to write a memoir, I’ve sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I’ve waited—sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair—for the story under pressure of concealment to reveal itself to me. I’ve been doing this work long enough to know that our feelings—that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it—are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters. There is no immediate gratification in this. [...] The gratification we memoirists do experience is infinitely deeper and more bittersweet. It is the complicated, abiding pleasure, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, of finding the universal thread that connects us to the rest of humanity, and, by doing so, turns our small, personal sorrows and individual tragedies into art.
I don't hate social media—I use it. I get sucked into it, but it's not my favorite.
I use Twitter for work, but I've never posted a status update on Facebook. I love posting and seeing pictures; I hate detailed statuses. Still, there are many little tidbits about my life I probably over share. Most days I just prefer to do it in person, and it's highly possible I choose to do that because I think it gives my stories more umph—and, of course, there's the added bonus that people are forced to listen to them.
We don't need to quietly sit on our moments to conjure up a great memoir, but the desire to announce them as soon as they occur is a mistake.
If it's true that a writer uses "distance ... to turn our powers of observation on ourselves" and create those self reflective characters, surely non writers are missing out on a similar chance of awareness by constantly telling the world about their happenings.
People have an amazing ability to internalize moments, good or bad, and become more cognizant of the world we live in—of ourselves, of our neighbors, etc. Why would we want to miss out on that? Every moment has an impact on us. If we neglect to give it time to sink in, we simultaneously rob it of the chance to impact our character.
That, to me, may be the biggest problem of social media. It's not that we have it or use it, but what it may slowly encourage and lead us to miss out on.