Abstract
Sharing is caring, or so children of a certain age were taught. Replete with fluffy clouds, Care Bear cartoons, and colorful rainbows, the assumed positivity behind the idea of ‘sharing’ lingers into adulthood. The trope of sharing – actually a contested, multivalent term – conjures up warm feelings of giving of the self in material and emotional ways. The cultivated expectation is that through sharing and offering personal openness, we may develop as individuals, enjoy a sense of fellowship with friends and strangers, and perhaps even improve society. Clearly, social media participants are invited, cajoled, pressured, or even covertly lured into sharing information about the self and one’s activities as a way of providing particular companies with commercial advantages, all under the guise of encouraging people to actively participate and connect with others. Indeed, some people have achieved deeply meaningful connections by being vulnerable online. Some participants have developed digital literacies and improved their media-making skills through interpersonal, mediated exchange.
But where did all this sharing come from? Does the type of sharing that is encouraged on social media such as Facebook offer the same connotations and outcomes as those portrayed to children through playful, ursine creatures? Is such sharing a new phenomenon that has largely emerged from the specific workings and technical features of Western social media? Or are current sharing practices simply a technologized expression of behaviors that have appeared for millennia in the anthropological record? (Spoiler alert: a little bit of none of these). As a matter of fact, what does the term ‘sharing’ actually connote in digital realms and what are the broad consequences of this type of sharing, especially on familiar and widespread social media sites?
The two books under review explore the intricacies and complications of sharing in the digital age. Both books deal with similar themes such as historicizing and challenging commonly accepted notions of sharing, discussing changes in the public/private relation, and exposing the limits and consequences of over sharing. They both deal with how sharing plays out on social media as well as other forms of digital sharing such as music file sharing. Both books express concern – to different degrees – about the consequences of such a deluge of sharing within online, Western cultural milieus. However, their methodological approaches and projects exhibit key differences. John’s book is concerned with agnostically unpacking what sharing means in our current digital era. It historicizes how sharing, as we know it, became a commonly understood practice that in fact collapses many meanings and behaviors when coalesced on social media platforms. Part of the techno-commercial integration and cultural acceptance of what is now known as ‘sharing’, the book argues, can be traced to a larger paradigm shift in the 20th century toward adopting ideas from cultures of self-disclosure. These include therapeutic cultures that urge converting private thoughts, activities – and mistakes – into public commentary that listeners-as-fellow-participants can help work through.
In contrast, Meikle’s project more directly deals with the consequences of sharing on social media, especially its political effects. While providing some illustrations of sharing’s positive outcomes in areas such as remix culture, the book initially anchors the reader into its argument by invoking dystopic vignettes about sharing that are grounded with concrete examples of sharing’s multi-faceted and often problematic consequences. It makes a plea for society as a whole to encourage digital literacies and to develop a collective ‘ethics of visibility’ that would stimulate critical thinking about online participation. The book wishes to raise awareness about what happens not only on social media sites but also more generally online – even when participants operate under the guise of well-meaning but ultimately ethically questionable projects in genres such as citizen journalism.
John’s book, The Age of Sharing, takes as its central task an historical excavation of the numerous connotations that have become collapsed into an over-determined term that we now refer to as ‘sharing’. The book offers a qualitative and diachronic analysis of large-scale corpora of English-word usage, to trace how the concept has become appropriated to various purposes, such as those of commercial social media companies. The research reveals that the concept has exhibited vastly different connotations across the last century. For example, prior meanings more literally emphasized its distributive roots, effectively rendering sharing as a zero-sum game in which a scarce material resource is carved up and distributed across different people. Over time, sharing also came to take on communicative connotations, including engaging in ‘telling’ behaviors to disclose and discuss issues of emotional importance to the sharer. In this sense, sharing initially and metaphorically referred to having others distribute the emotional load of a problem, thus lightening an individual’s burden. The sharing-as-telling activity eventually no longer referred to a zero-sum activity in an era of scarcity, but rather connoted feelings of working toward relationships based on fairness, equality, and trust within a field of informational abundance. Furthermore, John discusses how ‘sharing’ ultimately shifted from referring to the circulation of concrete things such as sharing personal photographs to abstract exhortations to ‘share your life’ or to ‘sign up and start sharing’.
A key project of John’s book is to trace a direct link between today’s forms of social media sharing and practices in a religious organization called the Oxford Group (no relation to the university) which was founded by an American missionary and was the precursor to Alcoholics Anonymous. He argues that this group played a central role in driving societies toward therapeutic cultures in which emotional sharing – especially of ‘sins’ or mistakes – ultimately promoted individual and inter-personal healing. John persuasively links several social media practices to similar societal trends in self-disclosure such as therapeutic cultures and staged confessionals in reality TV. John seems keen on focusing on the direct connection between digital sharing and the Oxford Group. Indeed, his excavation of their historical role in developing therapeutic practices that link to similar but not precisely equivalent social media sharing is truly fascinating. Although the Oxford Group exhibits differences from past religious rituals such as private confessions, it is worth noting, however, that its own practices emerged from much broader religious traditions of emulating Apostolic values, engaging in personal testimony, and witnessing.
The Age of Sharing takes pains to remain agnostic about whether such sharing is ultimately ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It critiques critics who decry so-called sharing behaviors on social media as ‘not really sharing’. Such critics contend that we have lost a true spirit of sharing and that we should work to recover it in digital realms. John agrees that it is productive to critically reflect on social media sharing behaviors. However, he notes that all too often such critiques are based on idealized, pre-Lapsarian notions of what sharing was assumed to encompass in the past.
A problem with such critiques is that the current concept of sharing cannot simply be imputed onto the anthropological record as being equivalent in value or practice. For example, Western bourgeois notions of sharing as caring that emerged in the latter half of the 20th century do not automatically correspond to nor work in the same way across all past societies, which did not always value sharing as a response to scarcity. John quotes anthropological research in which people in past societies blatantly avoided ‘sharing’ in rather stingy ways. To argue for a return to so-called pure forms of sharing, even in well-meaning religious contexts, is also to ignore the manipulations and flaws of those systems. For instance, individuals could be suspected of ‘sharing’ their problems publicly in an attempt to pass the hat and manipulate others to pay their troubles away. Sharing conceivably exhibited exploitative connotations long before the arrival of social media. Critics of therapeutic cultures also argue that such approaches tend to centralize problems and their solutions within individuals, rather than recognize systemic or infrastructural issues that lie quite beyond a single person’s ability to bootstrap themselves back into well-being. Asserting that social media sharing ‘is not really sharing’ risks perversely propping up conservative notions of sharing that are idealized and ideological, and do not offer guaranteed models of interpersonal connection or psychological health.
A similar argument is often made about online reciprocity. Critics express dismay that we are ‘losing reciprocity’ due to the selfish and narcissistic behaviors of digital participation. Again, the anthropological record, past and present, suggests that warm connotations of reciprocity are only part of the human story. Anthropological scholarship includes many examples of manipulative forms of reciprocity (Sahlins, 1972). Furthermore, in certain cases, it is actually the withholding of reciprocity that strengthens societal bonds (Godelier, 2002; Weiner, 1992). Such withholdings appear to remain important for community maintenance in present online, creative cultures such as those emerging from YouTube (Lange, 2010). Although John agrees that it is important to critique behaviors that are labeled ‘sharing’ on social media, he also wisely notes that it is theoretically impoverished to claim that past societies held the key to sharing and we must return to pre-Lapsarian versions of ‘sharing’ that were actually far from ideal. John’s work demonstrates the importance of bringing anthropological findings into conversation with media studies to avoid over-generalizing past human behavior as somehow suspiciously resembling idealized notions of what Western-oriented, social media–generated values and behavior should look like.
Meikle’s book, Social Media: Communication, Sharing and Visibility, is similarly concerned with challenging notions of sharing, but is more overtly critical of the consequences of sharing too much information systematically on social media. In part, drawing on John’s argument, Meikle also explores the definition of sharing and focuses on its roots in commercialism and marketing strategies in the early 2000s. The book principally draws on critical discourse analysis to tackle subjects such as sharing as an industry, remix cultures, citizen journalism’s limits, and distributed citizenship. Critical discourse analysis – which involves examining texts, discourse practices, and particular discursive events – is deployed to analyze relevant genres and their functions and effects. For example, Meikle examines Facebook’s mission statement to bolster the argument that use of the term sharing is always strategic. Meikle and John both note that the term ‘share’ appears in the concept of corporate shareholders, thus fundamentally connoting economic histories and profit margins. Meikle argues that Facebook’s exhortations to share are deceptively couched in discourses of altruism, utopianism, and empowerment. To bolster its commercial success, Facebook’s sharing strategy attempts to construct user dependence on it through covert discourses that imply that people cannot share properly until they have a platform like Facebook.
A very important intervention of Meikle’s book is that it shifts the discourse away from concerns purely about privacy to the rubric of visibility. A focus on privacy is arguably problematic in these contexts because much information that is voluntarily placed on social media is deliberately meant to be shared. Of course, it may be counter-argued that routine sharing of someone else’s private information remains a central concern. Nevertheless, for Meikle, it is the framing of public and shared information that takes on a central focus. To make its case, the book draws on examples such as the well-meaning but ethically questionable activities conducted by online participants during the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. In an attempt to assist law enforcement, people posted images of supposedly suspicious but ultimately innocent marathon attendees. Although they had appeared in a non-private setting, the use of people’s images in particular ways proposed a reality that was false and injurious to those who were erroneously pursued as suspects based on dubious visual clues. Meikle urges societal development of an ‘ethics of visibility’ that would ‘include a more careful consideration of who and what is valid for exposure’. Terms of service, which represent a contractual relationship, fall woefully short of outlining these considerations because (1) people do not understand the ‘legalese’ of such terms, (2) they frequently change, and (3) they tend to focus on one’s own privacy preferences rather than encouraging a wider sensitivity to what it means to use media to ‘make the invisible visible’. What is needed, Meikle proposes, are widespread tenets that professionally combine commercialism with ethical standards that take into consideration other people’s right to control the shaping of their public visibility.
In addition to dealing with popular digital subjects such as remix culture and memes and their possibilities for civic engagement, Meikle’s book also deals with changing notions of citizenship. The book proposes the concept of distributed citizenship, which focuses on how people develop shared meanings and engage in creative media production to achieve specific goals. Taking ideas about choice and consumption seriously, distributed citizenship connotes sets of political ‘potentials’ oriented around ‘culture, connection, and community’. Drawing from Berners-Lee’s (1999: 182–183) ideas about ‘intercreativity’, the book asserts that it is possible to achieve ‘intercreative online activism’ in strategic as well as tactical terms.
Intercreative online activism is an interesting notion that will undoubtedly require a good deal of cooperative work. Although not a central focus of the book, at several points Meikle pointedly argues that participation on social media sites does not constitute digital labor. This assertion needs a bit more ground work to be persuasive, as respected scholars have convincingly demonstrated that producing and sharing in mediated, digital realms function as uncompensated digital labor across various activities and genres (see, for instance, Andrejevic, 2004; Terranova, 2000). At the very least, working toward such aspirational, intercreative, distributed forms of citizenship will no doubt require commitment if they are to successfully secure ‘rights and responsibilities’ of particular networked publics (Varnelis, 2008).
In sum, John’s book provides an insightful and engaging historicization of the meaning of ‘sharing’ and how its kaleidoscopic connotations have coalesced in digital realms, yet have emerged from much broader cultural trends such as practices in cultures of self-disclosure. Meikle’s book offers a clearly written and well-researched critical analysis of social media sharing practices that will serve as a valuable tool for scholars and students in new media, popular culture, and media-based approaches to civic engagement. Both books are ideal for courses in digital cultures, new media studies, participatory cultures, popular culture, cultural studies, and discourse studies. Given its focus on excavating the historicized meaning of sharing using large-scale corpora analysis, John’s book is also suitable for courses in pragmatics and linguistic anthropology. Meikle’s book will also be of great value in courses on social media and civic engagement, in part because it delves into crucial limitations as well as pathways for working toward distributed citizenship.
The books under review represent solid contributions to the field and offer persuasive arguments – at least to scholars of particular generations who did not grow up under surveillance and did not face peer pressure to engage in reciprocally oriented social media sharing. Moving forward, one may legitimately ask whether research that offers well-articulated participatory warnings about commercial use of personal data on social media will easily find purchase within younger generations. Students in my Digital Cultures and New Media and Civic Action classes have clearly internalized adults’ warnings about refraining from posting career-threatening images such as drunken partying. But these books reveal that much more is at stake. Both books move beyond focusing on individual behaviors, and instead trace the underlying paradigms that conflate 20th century connotations of sharing as visible expressions of love with forms of social media participation that invisibly accumulate profit. Having grown up in a surveilled and algorithmic environment, it is sometimes difficult for students to recognize the need for developing critical perspectives about sharing even seemingly innocuous data about themselves and others in massively open ways. Nor can students always recognize, as these books eloquently describe, how paradigms of sharing are shaped by commercial and cultural histories that try to create a reality in which specific forms of sharing are positively normalized. Meikle crucially underscores the idea that we are not simply being reduced to our own data, but rather we are being reduced to ‘their’ data, or those compiled by commercialized entities for particular purposes.
Whether or not it will be easy to persuade younger people to take a critical perspective on social media sharing and ethics – even of publicly available information or seemingly innocuous non-personal data – is an empirical question. I recently spoke to a student who said that ‘sharing’ connotes a mere transaction to him – something that is not at all personal or emotional, as in the idea of ‘sharing’ a pdf file. Could the word be moving through yet another connotative shift? Are young people moving beyond early socializations that exhort them to accept surface-level connotations of sharing as caring? Educators will need materials that help identify the contours of sharing on a societal scale. The books reviewed here take a much-needed step in this direction by unveiling paradigms of sharing that attempt to create particular worldviews. Nevertheless, we should all be prepared to work toward identifying the arguments that not only resonate with scholars but will also persuade people who have grown up algorithmically and under surveillance to recognize and appreciate some of the hidden trade-offs that digital ‘sharing’ yields for their own lives and for society.