Lance Schaubert

Their stories evoked laughter, tears and head-nods. Their stories moved us regardless of a good telling or literary profundity.

Their stories moved us because they were theirs.

I refer to the terminus of Mark Scott’s seminar on Self-Disclosure. At that point, Dr. Scott invited us to share our stories – the ones that mattered. Mark received his DMin in the self-disclosure of sermonizers. He calls it “the collective lean-in” – that moment where the audience realizes that the speaker’s sharing something personal, something immanent, something that happened to them. “I was on my way to Vegas. . .” and the audience sets aside their doodles to listen.

But unmitigated disclosure does more harm than good, according to Mark. Things like, “share your scars, not open wounds,” taught us how to leave our current struggles off the stage. Mark compelled us to unbosom our scars, citing ancient texts. One black book under his arm betrays the fruit of his study, its yellow highlights accenting characters who spill the beans.

Psychotherapists listen. People need to share their heart more than they need advice, so counselors help people by letting others feel heard. Sharing, in this context, is caring – especially letting others share.

But disclosure reaches a threshold. Too much disclosure leads to mistrust or even bitterness. Guest speakers make the mistake of laying bare too much on the stage. They sound like arrogant fools or whiny teenagers procuring public self-therapy.

At that point in the seminar, Mark looked out at us and referenced our generation’s disclosure, how we crave it, how often we indulge. With no robust ideology to take the topic further, he said, “I’m dependent on you to teach me. People get online and share everything on blogs, dumping their whole life into status updates. How much is too much in a social networking world?”

He looked at me, and added, “I’m counting on you to teach me.”

Now he probably spaced out to remember prescriptions or groceries. I doubt that he meant Lance Schaubert needed to fill in his gap. Come to think of it, he might have looked at the guy behind me…

I don’t presume to teach Mark Scott anything, teachable as he is. However, I carried his question into my soul and ruminated.

He’s right.

We are in a new age of self-disclosure. . .

Mark Zuckerburg declared in a recent press conference that humanity will double the amount of things they disclose every year from here on out. They call it “Zuckerburg’s Law.” People share more every year. Whether by repins, reddits, reblogs, status updates, hashtags, stumbles or +1’s – people broadcast more and more. Beyond this, more people sign up for clusters of like-minded neighbors we call “social networks.” I find it as simpler to search through my Google Reader than Google itself. All of Google is moving that way. Tumbler and Pinterest orient their layout around visual consumption: people reuse, recycle and never reduce the visual information shared. On Horders, an old lady refuses to throw away napkin notes or artwork from deceased children of random acquaintances. She’s worried that her ideas and information might disappear.

Where to?

Who knows? The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, perhaps? In cyberspace, people share and share and share more, saving previously useless or nonexistent information like blurry outtakes from their sixth family christmas photo-shoot, the recipes regurgitated from a thousand different tweeters and the digital cousin of expired coupon clippings.

Last year Assange released that cablegate of thousands of top-secret documents on WikiLeaks. Initially, he exposed terrible things inside world embassies. In the end, cablegate amounted to little more than watching small children argue back and forth “I know you are, but what am I?” The American government fretted over her mildest offenses, since the cables earned classified and TOP SECRET stamps.

In reality, these sensitive documents had little or nothing to do with time-sensitive incursions or polically-sensitive ubieties and everything to do with over-sensitivity. Our self-conscious society applied makeup indiscriminately, hiding nonexistant blemishes. Think Photoshop.

Under Top Secret’s belly lurk bottom secrets – details that crawl onto Facebook feeds and YouTube playlists. Social security numbers and bank accounts create one kind of concern, but what about poor Charlie who has to grow up in a world that knows he bit his brother hard enough that it really hurt?

Trivial and funny, maybe, but not for Rebekah Black who, in youthful creativity, broadcasted her song about Friday, and by Monday morning discovered thousands of hateful comments and death threats. Hyper-political tweets by pastors (who should be aggressively non-partisan) hurt people during the debt ceiling debate, and in only 140 characters. We find it in the status version of suicide notes, embarrassing photos and the “I wish I’d never’ve said that” comment debates. I might point fingers at the hilarious (and disturbing) DYAC or Failbook, but in the same moment I’d reach across the table to text something my bride said, and she asks, “Please don’t tweet that,” while I say (like a fool), “Take another picture of me!” and “Yes, you can quote me on that.”

Should it surprise us that social network execs believe my sister’s will be the first generation to legally change their names after college just to land a job? We confuse success and greatness, forget heroes and worship celebrities – those bizarre creatures who don’t know a life away from the lens. We streamline regret and not-so-secrets for bottom feeders to comment on and share with their friends-of-friends. Where uncensored umbosoming concerns us, perhaps we aptly title our phenomena as “viral.”

As brother Scott taught, not all disclosure is created equal. There’s harmless disclosure like my tweet on October the 13th, 2011:

About the time I had to power wash the mold out of my crockpot, I realized I had slacked off in my dishwashing oath. #3months

But this crap fills the gaps between our automated updates and instigatory locutions so often that end doing what we do best: cushion our meaning in frivolous language. This questionable disclosure goes out to everyone creating a market either for circles by Google+ and Facebook smart lists or for humor sites like Failbook and DYAC  in hopes to weed out (or exploit) digital peeping Toms. On the other side of that curtain sits George Orwell’s warning, a character from Mark Twain and a list of men and women convicted of capital crime through posts on their Facebook walls.

Mark Scott called these “open wounds.” These tidbits of brutal honesty that catch our humanity shaking red hands with a suffering world. These tidbits trump help with hurt when we share them with 1,133 Facebook friends, 172 Pinterest followers, 294 Twitter followers and 41 blog subscribers. Whatever goodness social networks acheive in revolution, mass group therapy isn’t one.

Awhile ago I wrote about Sherman Alexie’s Facebook Sonnet. There’s this line: “let fame and shame intertwine.” That’s my point in a pithy, linguistic time capsule. Welcome to the new self-disclosure: where top-secret means nothing, celebrity gossip drowns out soul-stirring tales of heroes and the secrets that do thrive, cloy bottom feeders in the end.