Privacy, Please?

Are there things you draw the line at sharing on your blog or in comments on others' blogs or on Facebook? Is anything too intimate for public consumption or too delicate for discussion? Do you find yourself cringing at TMI?

In this day and age, when anybody with a computer can openly express their opinion or delve into the life of a celebrity, should we draw the line? Where? I know some of the things I have revealed would never have been shared by my parents. Is this a generational thing, or a mid-western line of thought (as Don Draper on Mad Men, said, when he fielded a question about 'who' he was in an interview: I'm from the mid-west, where we don't consider it polite to talk about ourselves.)?

An article I read several months ago in a news magazine made the case for 'over-sharing,' stating it could be a civic good in a way, by offering advice for 'intimate strangers' who may be struggling through the same issues you've dealt or are dealing with...and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts that each year Facebook users will share twice as much information as the year before, and that our children will reveal things that would shock and astonish their parents.

I don't know about Facebook, not exploring it much or on it enough to really delve into it, but I've found this blogging community to be highly interesting and entertaining. I probably will never meet any of you face-to-face, but in some ways I have grown to learn things about you some of your closest friends probably don't know. And visa-versa. I've learned worthwhile things in reading the blogs of others, and have found a support group of friends in the process.

I'm pretty sure some of my posts, particularly about my bouts of surgery and cancer, have turned off some readers and left others scratching their heads as to why I'd even put it out there. But it's been important to me to share information in the hopes of educating others -- maybe someone will learn a symptom and pursue it with their doctor. Maybe my comments have offered support or advice that someone has needed to read.

There are some things I doubt I'll ever post about, and if I come across something that I'd rather not think or read about, I'll get out of the site. I wouldn't betray a confidence or write anything embarrassing about another intimate. But all in all, I think being electronically connected to a vast network of strangers has been a worthwhile experience.