You are not what you share.

Spotify is a breath of fresh air for music lovers. For a modest monthly fee, you can listen to unlimited music. But since it launched in Belgium about three months ago, I have become the target of ridicule among my friends. One of Spotify’s default options is to share the music you listen to in real time within its network and, even more publicly, on Facebook. That makes it very easy to expose me as an avid listener of David Guetta, P!nk and Bruno Mars. Most of my friends look down on that a little.

Wired wrote about this phenomenon back in 2003. “Playlistism”, combining elitism and playlist, means discrimination not based on race, sex or religion, but on someone’s disastrous taste in music. It arose when university networks made it increasingly easy to view and share other people’s iTunes playlists. Students began to realise that maintaining their image also meant managing their playlists accordingly.

The phenomenon is also called “social guilt”. The more aware we are that we are sharing something, and the more public it is, the more we adjust our behaviour. As we share more and more online, we increasingly notice the effects.

On Foursquare, we do not check in everywhere: only at places that are cool to share. So bars, airports and restaurants are overrepresented, while supermarkets, schools and sexual-health clinics are underrepresented. On Instagram and Facebook, we share only our nicest photos and remove tags when we do not look flattering enough. That has consequences.

As more consumer research is based on social media, we must increasingly account for the bias created by playlistism and social guilt. Data we do not consciously share, and which are not directly public, become more valuable in that context: raw mobile-tower location data, Google search behaviour and shopping behaviour in stores, for example.

It also raises the question of whether consumers will experience social guilt and playlistism when, in the coming years, they increasingly share their actual purchases online. Will we buy different things at Delhaize, MediaMarkt or Thomas Cook when we know other people are watching?

Finally, there is the personal level. Around New Year, I spoke to a social worker in Amsterdam who regularly treated young people from more affluent backgrounds. These young people, mainly girls, struggled with the impression that their friends had wonderfully exciting lives while they did not. Every time they opened Facebook, they saw their friends’ fascinating lives and promptly felt worse about their own.

The wonderful Facebook life was merely a caricature of the real one. It lends an unpleasant aftertaste to the line: “May your life someday be as awesome as you pretend it is on Facebook.”

We are not what we share.

Written in 2012, translated, left as it was. Where I took it later: How Amazon Echo made me a worse person.

Original (Dutch): You are not what you share, Media Marketing, 20 January 2012.