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What is this new trend of file sharing compulsion? Why do we suddenly feel the need to share via a status update or a re-post on our Superwall what we are doing at the moment? Who cares if your purse got stolen in a crowded bus, if the weather in the part of your world sucks, or if a plane just crashed into a building near you? Moreover, why do we feel to necessarily share with others what we read, see, listen or hear? Well, the answer is simple: as we need sympathy, approval, acceptance and kinship support. It is only human.

Peter Senge thought that “Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes”.

Like him, I thought that the road to knowledge is via sharing and trying to obtain the others interest and make them resonate with you. This is how we affiliate, based on likeness, and not on variety. I will never make friends with a person who belongs to a Facebook group that “Impales Golden Retrievers in their spare time” or thinks “Hitler was an amazing person”. However, I will try to make friends with someone who has an interest in psychology, journalism, social quantum change, and thinks Burroughs’ Naked Lunch should be studied in school.

Each time we click on a “share” button (which now is a mandatory technical presence all over the internet media) we require the others to give us their attention, to stop what they are doing and for the next few minutes to read or listen what we are writing/reading or listen. Surely, there is always the option not to do that, but how many real life relations have not been broken over virtual misunderstandings?

My real question is how mentally healthy it is when we come across internet buttons at the end of each piece and compulsion is just one click away? Can the share impulse be defined as “compulsion”? Does it have all attributes? According to the textbooks, the compulsion is a repetitive, excessive, meaningless activity or mental exercise that a person performs in an attempt to avoid distress or worry. How stress relieving is when I repeatedly share articles from Scientific American Mind or Psychology Today? If sharing becomes a compulsion, its performance will relieve distress but only temporarily and on the long term the sharing obsessed person will have to seek some other relievers like compulsively checking their email account or cell phone inbox every other minute.

Sigmund Freud used the German word Zwang to describe compulsion, a word which derived from the Latin compulsio, and originally meant "constraint”. Yet, are we constrained to share? Does the internet condition us? Is Facebook or Twitter sharing act dominated by inevitable destiny or hopeless determinism? No, it isn’t, as the internet or social networks are not insurmountable in the drive, and we can certainly avoid that.

If you were my (Facebook) friend

OK, let’s take this real life conversation: “I have mentioned this issue in my last blog post and I have shared it on Facebook. If you paid attention, you knew what I was talking about. I won’t repeat it again now”. What is wrong with this particular (let alone absurd) reproach?

Oh, well, a new feeling of guilt is created as if you cared about your friends, you would have taken the time to read their posts- so they claim. Obviously, this last statement is not true. None of your friends are obliged to read your creations and none should feel guilty if they don’t. When you took the decision to advertise your product (be it a piece of literature, a song you wrote, some design you came up with) you should have taken into consideration the potential market response: some want it, some don’t. You need to assume the responsibility and emotional maturity of potential rejection. This is how we grow and develop, forged by failures and basking in success. If non-acceptance makes you feel sad, rejected, misunderstood, lonely, it is entirely up to you and solely your issue, not the others.

Similarly, the whole idea of friendship got a new dimension over social network sites. We affiliate with people we don’t know and yet we consider friends. I myself have asked people to accept my friend request hoping they are Facebook active and they regularly post interesting and new things (mostly pieces on psychology) on their “walls”. Those who failed to do that were deleted after a trial period, either being well-known names in the field or not. I hoped that my action would go unnoticed or worse case scenario, forgiven.

However, a few Facebook acquaintances decided to do the same. They have deleted me off their buddies list, without prior mishap. And that was fine. Facebook is just a virtual agora and we are not exactly friends. So no feelings were seriously hurt in the process. One of them told me he felt assaulted not necessarily by my frequent psychology articles sharing compulsion, which he found somehow interesting, but by the numerous comments my other friends posted on my wall.

He asked to be re-added. I will not however tell you what I did. Virtual deletion, as any action we perform, has a deeper meaning. We want to become oblivious of something, we want to delete, remove, and wipe out something or someone. Needless to say, such virtual act has real consequences. A deletion is a deletion. Like a word you said, it cannot be taken back. Some relationships are meant to subside. Others will flourish.

Social networking anxiety disorder

People who are more sensitive or unstable even get a sort of anxiety which started to have been recognized lately as a serious and real disorder: a social networking anxiety disorder.

While social anxiety disorder implies fear of being closely watched, judged, and criticized by others, the social networking anxiety disorder might actually combat the SAD by allowing its users to present themselves in a more favorable light: pictures that make the person look better than in reality; selected profile info; creamed up internet postings that make the others think that the re-poster is smarter than he actually is; name dropping or name affiliation by re-posting some articles that “buddies” on the friend list write. All in all, social networks make us look and seem better, prettier, and smarter.

Worse case scenario, if you have any social network weaknesses, you can simply “remove” an impulsive status update which might embarrass you later on, which is definitely not something you could do in real life without counting on collective oblivion.

Some even go further and re-post mass media clippings that they do not even read themselves but have interesting, funny, outrageous or intellectually posh titles enough to transmit to the others “hey, I am an interesting, funny, outrageous and intellectually posh person since I am reading this”. Thus, we collect a handful of first impressions, never getting to the bottom of second or third ones. Our virtual acquaintances are perfect and meet our natural necessity to socialize. We are accepted and admired. What else do we need? Well, for starters, a reality check. See how many people you can delete without them noticing this. Try to see how close the ones remaining are to you. Try to contact them and know them better, they are, after all, “your friends”. See how many accept and share your views on life. Or death. Not many, are there? Ideally, the number should be below 150. And that is a good thing.