Infographic: Should you share that on social media?

"Writing means sharing. It is part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, opinion." - Paulo Coelho

Sharing is caring, at least that is what we're taught in kindergarten. Millenials are the generation that lived through the momentous growth of social media, and we are the generation that has experienced both the world both before and after its advent.

Where once we only knew of long lost friends' life changes through announcements in the newspaper or perhaps the town gossip, we are now daily inundated with engagement, wedding, birth, death, new job, new house, and other major life announcements via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Blogger. On the flipside, I bet people know more minutia about my life than they ever cared to. I never knew how many health problems people had, never realized how funny some people were, seldom noticed how many things in common I shared with distant acquaintances.

There's good and bad, of course, to this phenomenon. What a blessing it can be to be able to share good news with everyone you know, or to reach out to people you haven't seen or heard from in years. What a curse it can be when you see a post that makes you bury your head in your hands and ponder the fate of humanity.

Discretion is an acquired skill, and I'll be the first to tell you that I often lack it. Like that time I needed to post an ad on Craigslist for a new roommate and put my apartment address and actual apartment number on the post (super dangerous). But aside from the occasional faux pas, I do make a concerted effort to think through what I'm posting on Facebook. I ask myself questions like: who is this going to piss off? who might find this funny? who will probably defriend me if I post this?

Sometimes I don't care, and sometimes I think twice about how I portray myself and use my discretion not to post something (I've got a whole blog about feminism sitting in my drafts because I'm afraid I'll piss off some close friends).

Some people don't seem to use a similar filter... or, any filter, for that matter. And for those people I have created this helpful flowchart to assist them in using a basic level of discretion.

All for now, more to come.

-A