What really is the difference between writing something in a notebook and writing it in a header? The words may be the same. The impulse may be the same. The format is different, and the audience is different, but the basic act, choosing a language for something you feel or sense and sending it outside your head, is closer than the comparison usually gives it credit for.
There is a familiar cultural reading of online posting that frames it as performance. It is assumed that a person who shares a photo of his sorrows, quiet mornings, half-formed thoughts is looking for validation. The assumption is so entrenched that it carries the weight of common sense. But it tends to make something different than what it describes.
Researchers at the University of Turin It examined nearly 29,000 Facebook posts among 201 users and found something challenging the performance framework. Analyzing what people actually post, they found that “posts and comments shared on SNS can be considered traditional diary or journal entries in the sense that they can reflect users’ tastes, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs.” The comparison is not accidental. A journal entry and a social media post can serve the same function: putting into words something unformed that otherwise lives inside the person writing it.
The expressive function of sharing
Research into why people share on social media has consistently found that motivation is more layered than the attention-grabbing framework suggests. A study examining media sharing behavior It found that “social and emotional influences play an important role in media sharing behavior.” It is easy to read this finding as confirmation of performativity theory, since emotional sharing may sound like the same thing as seeking an emotional response. But the social and emotional effects describe something broader. It involves the need to express feelings, to give them enough form to exist outside of one’s own head.
There is a difference between posting to be admired and posting to be heard. The first is about the audience. The last thing is not to be alone. Someone who says “I’ve been thinking about this all week” in the caption is not managing their image. They can do what a person does when they write that sentence at the top of a journal page: get the thought into a form that makes it real enough to look at.
The answer is what changes
Placing parts paths with a journal is the answer. Notebook does not write back. A post can. This difference changes the character of the act without necessarily denying its expressive function. A person writing in a notebook and a person posting a caption may have similar inner work, the work of expressing something they carry. The sender does so in a place where what they write can reach someone and someone can recognize it.
Regardless of circumstance, introversion, isolation, or special form of the day, this opportunity is nothing for people who don’t have easy access to someone to talk to. A post that received “same” in the comments functioned as something closer to a relationship than a performance. He told the person who wrote this that they are not as alone as they feel with what they carry.
Not all shipments are express processing. A significant part of this is performance. Part of it is boredom. One part is self-promotion in one form or another.
But a reflexive reading of everything shared online as a cry for attention misses the quieter part: people sitting down with something they haven’t quite worked with, finding language, and sometimes, unexpectedly, sending it somewhere that might respond.
