Then 1950, family dinner in America it was a minefield of social rules. According to a politeness film from that year, children were expected to arrive promptly with combed hair and clean faces; the girls should have changed out of their school clothes into “something more festive”. Most importantly, the topics of conversation had to be chosen carefully. Discussing financial matters, the narrator said, was a difficult no; so were long personal anecdotes, mentions of “unpleasant events” and any reference to “unpleasant news”. “With your family you can relax, be yourself,” the off-camera voice assured the viewer. “Just make sure it’s your best self.”
For centuries, strict social norms dictated what people could politely talk about—and, by extension, how much they knew about each other, even those who were closest to them. However, by the end of the 20th century, films like A meeting with your family, the 1950 guidebook, had begun to resemble artifacts, remnants of a rigid social age. Conversational taboos were slipping away. Etiquette manuals had lost their cultural content. Sexuality was being discussed more openly, thanks in part to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the efforts of HIV/AIDS activists in the 1980s and 1990s. And books like Prozac nation who were honestly dealing with mental illness were displaying a new, raw form of memories. In 2022, the idea that we should carefully control what personal information we share – and receive – may seem antiquated, even dystopian.
Or maybe not. Today, a troubling question seems to be on many people’s minds: Do we know too much about those around us? Advice columnists are asking questions about how to protect yourself from oversharing, as well as what constitutes TMI (“too much information”) in the first place; psychology websites are advising readers on how to deal with “TMI-prone friends”; the personal-essay genre is caught up in an endless discourse of its own self-indulgence; TikTokers are accusing their peers of revealing life details to the point of “trauma dumping”. As society-wide norms have loosened, individuals have taken on the burden of navigating their own boundaries – and it’s not always easy. The result, it seems, is a new backlash against over-distribution.
Oyour modern concept overcrowding can be traced back hundreds of years. From the 17th to the 19th century, a trove of “citizenship manuals” detailing the rules of conversation began to sweep across Europe, as historian Peter Burke points out in his book. The art of conversation. A French manual warned against the use of “dishonest words”, such as BREAST; Other writers felt that direct questions like “Where have you been?” they were rude. Discussing dreams was not generally considered a wasteful diversion. These rules weren’t just theorized in books: Some communities developed tools to enforce them. Around the turn of the century, federal laws prohibited people from writing “obscene” or “indecent” letters and were often used to target women who discussed contraceptives. In the French navy in the 1920s, enlisted men would place small objects—such as a miniature dinghy or a small ladder—on the dinner table to warn people that they were about to make a conversational faux pas.
Subsequently, and in the years since, our understanding of what constitutes an overpayment usually depends on who is sharing. Rachel Sykes, a literature professor at the University of Birmingham in England, points out that the writers most famous for disseminating personal information are the “narrative poets,” including Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. “The person who coined the term confessional poetry“—a literary critic named Macha Rosenthal—”excused it mostly on men, but on women, he found it repulsive,” Sykes told me. Critics tend to chastise women, especially women of color, more harshly for their revelations personal. Discussions of queer sex, meanwhile, are much more likely to be called “gratuitous” than discussions of heterosexual sex. What we consider an overvaluation is a way of “showing whose subjectivity is valued and whose is allowed to occupy space,” they said.
The reaction to a discovery has always depended, too, on the environment in which it occurs. Different contexts – work, home, a party, a conversation with a best friend – come at different rates. Going over the juicy details of your relationship from last week might be perfectly normal with your friend, a little weird with an acquaintance at a party, and completely off limits with your boss.
However, in general, social definitions have loosened over time. Office culture is much more informal today than in years past; in many white-collar jobs, bosses even encourage employees to bring their “whole selves” to work by sharing more about their lives outside the office. Parenting, too, has become less strict and hierarchical, with a greater focus on warmth and even friendship within the parent-child relationship. Even the etiquette books are more relaxed. A 2014 study found that while early 20th-century etiquette books tended to give specific rules, today’s etiquette guides are much more general—advocating a fluid set of “rules” that help us to interact carefully,” as an updated version of Emily. The post Rules of etiquette suggests, rather than a one-size-fits-all directive.
This increased openness hasn’t happened without some backlash along the way. When the first postcards went on sale in the US in 1873, for example, many worried that the more casual format would encourage unthinking discovery. “In the old days, a letter was an important matter, not to be lightly scribbled, and was sent only when the writer had something to say,” complained a Boston-based magazine in 1884. The advent of talk shows and Reality TV prompted similar concerns: Suddenly, the inner lives of strangers were packaged for a mass audience. A New York Times The contributor lamented, in 2000, the rise of entertainment involving “people sharing and spreading the least provocation”.
New forms of communication always introduce “a kind of back and forth, pushing the boundaries of where the lines are,” says Jenny Kennedy, a researcher at RMIT University in Australia who has studied oversharing. With each advance—a postcard without the protection of an envelope, a talk-show guest’s personal struggles beamed directly into your living room—private stories can spill into new, more public realms. Our context-specific partitioning rules don’t work so well when those contexts start falling behind each other.
Today, the Internet and social media have increased this kind of decontextualization. “We all have this idea of who is watching and consuming our content that we make online,” Kennedy told me. But that “perceived audience may actually be quite different from the real audience.” We are inundated with very personal posts that may not have been written with us in mind and may come across as intrusive. You might sign up hoping to see a cat posing as a supermodel and instead find strangers discussing their most intimate traumas.
Increasingly, however, people seem eager to reinstall some boundaries. New online privacy features, such as Twitter’s Circle and Instagram’s Close Friends, limit the reach of certain posts so that only a pre-selected group can see them; users no longer have to risk their aunt finding out about their trip to the shroom, or their babysitter seeing photos from their night out. Meanwhile, many workers are realizing that they want to build walls between their work life and their personal life; after all, they don’t want to bring their “whole self” to the office. Critics of “permissive parenting” are pushing the notion that children need rules and expectations, not friendship, from their parents — and that both parties deserve some privacy from each other.
This desire for emotional distance is also spilling over into intimate friendships. In 2019, a relationship coach tweeted that everyone should feel empowered to turn down friends who ask for support. She suggested the following response: “I’m so glad you contacted me. I’m actually at capacity… I don’t think I can hold the right space for you.” The tweet quickly became a meme, but it pointed to a real problem. In an age of instant and abundant communication, how do you retreat when you feel overwhelmed? If it seems like there isn’t a clear answer, that’s because we’ve left the era of hard and clear rules behind. We are entering a new one, in which the rules are custom and the arbiters are each of us.
Of course, we must not go back to where we came from—a time when “unpleasant phenomena” could not be discussed, let alone mental illness, sexuality, and gender presentation. But without, say, social engineering movies to guide our dinner table conversations, we all have to figure out how much of ourselves we want to give to our friends, family, and colleagues at any given moment, and how much we want to receive. of them in turn. Maybe one day each of us will stumble into a rhythm: put up guardrails when we need to, open up when it feels right, and feel grateful to have a choice at all. Right now, we are just living the hard part.
