If you spend any part of your working week sitting at a computer screen or casually scrolling through a social media stream of content designed to grab your attention, you know the story of Sam and Nia Rader.

On their YouTube channel, the couple, who bill themselves as both god-fearing and good looking – sinful pride be damned – shared their pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage over the course of three days. In the process, they gained supporters, haters, and a revenue stream strong enough to lead Sam, the sole breadwinner, to the decision to quit his job nursing hospital patients to nurse his fledgling career as an Internet star.  

Their baby had a heartbeat, Sam and Nia shared with the world, in a video produced to tug on our heartstrings.

Personal and private lives make for strange bedfellows in the world of vlogging. While most women traditionally wait for the 12 week point in their pregnancies to announce the forthcoming pitter patter, sharing it in real time, or pretty close it, now seems increasingly common. Videos of unsuspecting men discovering they are expectant fathers are so much the norm that the mothers left holding the camera need to think of ever more inventive ways to elicit that share-worthy reaction. With hidden pregnancy tests or full-blown ‘heavens-to-Etsy’ explosions of kitsch DIY mood boards, the world and his mother are clamouring to let you and everyone you know every detail of their lives. After the unskippable advert runs its course, of course.

This is the sharing generation, where people are more than content to turn their lives into content, consumable in bite-sized chunks viewers can dip in and out of while blow drying their hair or flossing their teeth.

"How long is it until YouTube couples are livestreaming the moment of fertilisation?"

Anyone – and, it seems more and more, everyone – can fall prey to the irresistible call of oversharing on the Internet. Even when it’s ill advised, like pictures of vomit-flecked nights on the lash tagged for prospective employers to rifle through, we cannot seem to stop ourselves from laying bare a digitised and time stamp evidence of what we’re up to. How long is it until a YouTube couple like Sam and Nia are Periscoping their lovemaking in an effort to share the moment of fertilisation with their adoring fans?

What it is that creates this need for sharing every detail, however traumatic or boring, with the world?

Researchers at Harvard came to the conclusion a couple of years ago that the act of moving our thoughts from out of brains and into the wider world at the touch of button sends the brain’s neurochemical reward system into a joy-inducing overdrive. What’s more, it’s considerably more enjoyable than paying heed to what other people, with their own stupid and rewardless feelings, are feeling.

But the importance of the medium cannot be ignored, and the Internet plays a significant role in distribution of a life and all of its experiences around the world. And it also informs the parts of ourselves that we’re willing to show the world.

In his paper on the sharing culture so dominating social media today, Prof Russell W Belk, an expert in marketing at Toronto’s York University, writes that our symbiotic dependence on social media stokes a belief that we, as collective individuals, self-curate our identities into personality we want the world to like.

"It's easier to let it all out – it’s almost like we’re invisible.”

In Journal of Consumer Research, Belk writes that “When we’re looking at the screen we’re not face-to-face with someone who can immediately respond to us, so it’s easier to let it all out – it’s almost like we’re invisible.”

Sharing ourselves, warts and all, is easier when the only person listening is a DSLR and a lighting rig. It’s easy to not feel judged when all you’re staring at a red light, and this so-called ‘disinhibition effect’ means we’re far more willing to put it all out there, whether that means airing dirty laundry, exposing flaws, revealing one’s sexuality, or the loss of a baby.

But, then again, there’s always the other side of the coin. For many social media users, for whom it is a lifestyle and a career rather than just an extension of their personality, a tug of war is going on, the threads of their lives being pulled in two directions between privacy and publicity. The potential of Internet stardom and the rewards associated with it – wealth, fame, loads of free shit to be unboxed and savoured in front of a lens – mean that a generation of Internet users are looking at the fresh-faced influencers on YouTube and thinking, “I could do that.”

"Being popular isn’t just a job, it’s an industry."

Think about it; when you were a teenager, being popular probably meant that the people in your school thought you were cool. In 2015, who cares what those chumps think when there’s no limit to how well known a teenager could feasibly become because of Twitter account, a Facebook post, or a Vine series. While people might have wanted to borrow your nice jacket, teenagers today are literally selling their own branded merchandise to people all over the world. Being popular isn’t just a job, it’s an industry.

And popularity is exactly what Sam and Nia had in mind when they started posting their videos on a daily basis a year ago.

As Amanda Hess, writing in Canada’s National Post, pointed out, in the space of a couple of days, in headlines on websites they went from a nameless ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ to “YouTube stars Sam and Nia.” And they followed up the video of their miscarriage with one announcing their rebirth as full-time vloggers.

“I’ve always had a dream to be famous,” Sam Rader recently told Buzzfeed. And he wants to share that dream with everyone. And for them to share it with everyone, too.

Every week on The Right Hook, James Dempsey tries to teach an old dog new tricks, and catch George up with what's making waves in the world of pop culture. You can listen back to last week's segment below: