Abstract
Sharing is ubiquitous. Nicholas John in The Age of Sharing mainly focuses on the meanings and values associated with the practices of sharing. John, an assistant professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, conceptualizes sharing as a style of interpersonal relationships, such as caring, openness, and mutuality.
From John’s perspective, sharing is about reproduction and distribution, and the sharing economy should be based on collective consumption. As human beings, we have the tendency to share and cooperate, which gives meaning to sharing as a form of social relationship. In the context of the Internet, although sharing is naturally associated with cooperation and collaboration, the term did not appear with the emergence of the Internet. The term sharing rarely figured in the Internet studies of Rheingold, Turner, or Boyd and Ellison, not until the mid-2000s. John argues that we should distinguish between practices like telling people what we are doing on Facebook and practices that involve keeping a community “entertained and informed.” The former is more like the act of posting, while the latter may be “perceived as the ‘truer’ or more ‘authentic’ sense of sharing.” On one hand, sharing is about publishing web information on users’ walls. On the other hand, sharing is also a form of communication and the sense of being connected. In addition, sharing is telling, which comes from social support groups. We are willing to share our experiences and feelings with others. In the context of the Internet, social networking sites (SNS) are a part of today’s therapy culture. Facebook may help to improve interpersonal relationships.
John provides many compelling cases to illustrate sharing as a form of interpersonal relationship. He chooses examples that come not only from the present time but also from the early days. For instance, John uses extracts from novels to explain how sharing could be telling. He quotes from a children’s book published in 1851, “when they went home, Fanny was as happy as ever again, for she found that her heart was very much lightened by sharing her troubles with her brother.” The example enforces the point John makes: Sharing presents naturally from the history of human beings. Furthermore, John explains how sharing is a form of emotional support and interpersonal relationship. He gives examples of sharing between teachers and students, doctors and nurses, support groups, and couples. John emphasizes the differences between the behavior of sharing and when we think of sharing. From his point of view, sharing may not be identical to caring. However, we make the association between the two when talking about and being told about it. He provides convincing examples from Tiger Woods’s book How I Play Golf and from Facebook to illustrate the connection between sharing and caring. We may be skeptical of the purpose when people say, “sharing with you,” but we do think they care for us.
However, John does not adequately explain the relationship between sharing and prosociality. He explains prosociality as a process of gifting, where people contribute content online for free. I expected more on how and why sharing could increase prosocial behavior. However, he does not offer any definitive answers for it. Furthermore, in Chapter 5, John makes an argument about sharing as talking about feeling and emotions. He does not provide any answer to how SNS could benefit from the therapeutic sense of sharing, especially from a psychological point of view.
In addition, The Age of Sharing may be expending too much effort on giving examples to make most of the points. In other words, the book could benefit from more explicit identification of the key concepts before using rich evidence to illustrate. For example, in Chapter 4: Sharing Economies, it devotes several pages to explaining how sharing economy is no different than the human instinct of cooperation. However, it does not explain clearly which businesses use the idea of a sharing economy. John mentions a few peer-to-peer communities, such as Wikipedia, BitTorrent, and YouTube, but why not Uber and Airbnb? Do they fit into the notion of offline sharing? In addition, the same chapter argues that new technologies drive offline sharing because the Internet induces trust. I wonder whether this is a convincing reason, as we know that the credibility of Internet content is fragile. Moreover, John mentions sharing as self-expression several times throughout the book but does not provide further explanations.
Compared with other works that emphasize the power dynamics and discourses of sharing, The Age of Sharing focuses more on the meaning of sharing as a central term in the sharing industry. Similar to John, for example, Meikle agrees in Social Media: Communication, Sharing and Visibility (2016) that the practices of sharing bring new business models. However, Meikle uses Facebook’s mission statement to show that the use of the term sharing is a strategic move and “a metaphor for sell.” Facebook uses “share” to persuade users to contribute to its database, which is used to attract advertisers. Thus, while scholars like Meikle see sharing in terms of power and commodification, The Age of Sharing’s major contribution is that it illustrates how the practices of sharing brings value to us, and what we think when talking about sharing. It explicitly conceptualizes sharing as telling, as communication, and as caring. People who are interested in the discourse on sharing could benefit from the book. Overall, The Age of Sharing represents a salutary addition to the current academic studies of sharing.