Sharing is Caring
People forever fail to agree on whether social media have diminished the values traditionally associated with sharing or whether they simply added new functions and meanings to an essential social activity. For a better understanding about the rhetoric of sharing on social media we should first answer the question; what is sharing anyway?
If you are reading this, it is most likely because sharing interests you. But what do we know about the English word — “sharing?” Sharing is when you let others have some of what’s yours, it is about division and distribution. Furthermore, sharing is a way of communication between two or more people, it sometimes allows the formation of intimate relations (such as sharing hopes, dreams and fears) which forms communities and it also allows collaboration and cooperative work (people sharing information during an exam ‘cheating’). Thus sharing has 3 forms of sociality therefore we say that sharing is part of the social world.
People share for many reasons, such as creating bonds and friendly relations (when you share food with your friends), maintaining trust and cooperation (sharing secrets with your friends), spreading knowledge and expertise (teacher sharing her knowledge with her students in the class), celebrating life (sharing your happiness with others in weddings and birthdays) etc.
Nevertheless, sharing is not necessarily selfless but invested with self-interest. It’s not about giving things away for free but investing in the support of others in the future (I’ll lend you my pen so that if I ever forget my pen you’ll lend me yours). Thus sharing secures collaboration or the return of favors at a later moment in time. Sharing in this sense is a complex bargain in which the values exchanged and the assets traded cannot necessarily be measured in monetary terms.
Considering now we know why sometimes we share stories with our co-workers at the water cooler and pass along rumors to our neighbors, we can further discuss the word “sharing” in the computing diction. According to John (2017),the idea of sharing has always been linked to computers, from time sharing, through disk sharing to file sharing, and for many years this use of sharing was fairly neutral (even today, when you set up printer sharing at home you don’t feel inspired by the values we nowadays associate with sharing). However, when it became inextricably associated with social media around the years 2005–2007, it was imbued with the positive and pro-social senses captured by the conjunction of “sharing” with “caring” (John, 2017).
Sharing on social media varies from one type of platform to another. On Facebook, people can share videos, pictures, news and events by posting them on their friends’ walls or by tagging people on these posts. Facebook also features the suggest option, where a person can suggest his/her friends to other friends (formation of communities). Twitter on the other hand, allows people to share news and statements (sharing of information & knowledge) in addition Twitter allows the sharing of resources such as the public lists. Instagram is a tool where people can share pictures with each other (celebrating life). Moreover, Youtube enables its users to share videos, clips & music videos to the whole world. However, all of these platforms are alike in two features, the comment feature and the like feature. Facebook for example integrated likes, dislikes, anger, heart etc. buttons to simplify the sharing of emotions. Today through the like buttons a person can convey his/her admiration through one single click and the comments section enables the users to share their thoughts, negative comments and positive ones. A lot of times the comment boxes are used to open arguments or to offer cooperative work and help, and other times they’re used to express content, love, admiration or even hate and disgust. The difference between sharing through the comment section and through the click buttons resemble the difference between an interview and a questionnaire respectively, the first is open-ended and the other is limited.
People are now able to share much more than thoughts and emotions. A lot of media platforms enable their users to share their location, which was not even possible before social media came about. Nevertheless, sharing games is now possible too, through sharing links. Sharing a link today is like sharing a bridge, for example people can send links on what’s app that gives you access to Youtube, Facebook, Google etc.
Social media platforms use rhetoric of sharing to establish their function as facilitators of social engagement. Facebook claims that it helps you connect and share with the people in your life, on the other hand Twitter says that it helps you find out what’s happening right now with the people and organization you care about and a lot of other platforms promise a lot of other social sharing benefits. But again, how much are these claims reliable? Social media does have some social values however they were brought by young American white men for corporate work. These platforms dream of great connections which are attained by a wider sharing with further opportunities to generate data, In addition sharing data brings them also free publically generated content (Kennedy, 2013).
According to Kennedy (2013), when you have control over what you share, you want to share more, when you share more the world becomes more open and connected. But what if we didn’t have control over what we share? According to Esel a Facebook user, if a person likes something it is automatically shared with all his/her friends to say “this person liked this you should like it as well” so they are definitely like directing you in which ways to share stuff. In this case scenario a person or some people are not fully in control over what they share because they are influenced by their friends.
In conclusion, social media enables a person to share with a broad audience in a really fast manner, and adds new functions and meanings to an essential social activity but it simplifies them and makes them straightforward, however a person should be media literate and critical, accompanied by the right media education so that he/she doesn’t lose the values of his/her sharing experience. Moreover, people who benefit the most from the social media are its owners, campaign directors and marketers, who most of the times are earning profit through social media (Kennedy, 2013.) Therefor, we share what we want to share on social media platforms and gain the benefits of sharing (only if we were in control) but ‘sharing’ isn’t purely meant for the purpose of our benefit, the real winners are those who provided us with these features so that we generate content for them and in rich them with data users.
References:
Jhon, N. (2017). A Short History of the Word Sharing. Sharable.
Kennedy, J. (2013.) Rhetorics of Sharing: Data, Imagination and Desire. Unlike Us Reader, 127–136.
