Cultures and Ethics of Sharing - Universität Innsbruck

46 Nicholas A. JohnIn addition to being an act of distribution, sharing can also be an act of communication. 1This is the case when we talk about sharing our feelings or emotions. Unlike the two previousmeanings of sharing, this sense of sharing would appear to be somewhat newer. Indeed,the first citation for the meaning of sharing as “to impart to others one’s spiritualexperiences” only dates back to 1932 and is offered in the context of the Oxford Group, aChristian movement popular in the 1920s and 1930s.From here it is a short step to the notion of sharing one’s feelings that is central to the formationand maintenance of intimate relations in contemporary western society. While sociologistof emotions Eva Illouz does not herself define sharing, this sense of the word isunmistakable in her definition of the therapeutic ideal as “the injunction to share all needsand feelings” (Illouz, 2008, p. 227). Similarly, in Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s book onintimate life, they describe a “far-reaching transition. What used to be a team sharing thework [i.e., pre-modern agricultural families] has turned into a couple sharing emotions”(Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995, p. 48). Additionally, as Wuthnow explains when discussinga woman who was forced out of a support group for talking too much, the sharingof emotions, like the sharing of treats, also entails “explicit norms about reciprocity”(Wuthnow, 1994, p. 156). Similarly to the act of sharing a candy bar, the sharing of emotionsalso creates and regulates social ties.This, then, is about as far as the dictionary takes us. In fact, I have already gone furtherthan the dictionary. For instance, the above definitions do not tell us about the technologicalor social conditions of sharing; they do not tell us about the social constraints on sharing,or social sanctions for not sharing; nor do they tell us about the interrelations betweendifferent meanings of sharing today. These, though, are the types of questions we shouldbe asking if we wish to understand the social logics of sharing.2. Sharing in Web 2.0Sharing is the fundamental and constitutive activity of Web 2.0 in general, and social networksites in particular. By Web 2.0 I mean Internet services based on user-generatedcontent, most famously Facebook, but also YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, wikis, blogs and ahost of others, all of which encourage us to share in various ways: countless websites havesome kind of “Share” button that enables the surfer to bring the page to the attention ofothers—by email, via a status update on Facebook or Twitter, and so on; the Web’s largestdedicated photo-sharing site, Flickr, urges the visitor to “Share your photos;” on Facebook,where we are encouraged to “connect and share with the people in your life,” the actof posting a status update (or link, photo or video) is also called “sharing;” and so on and1 Wittel (2011) distinguishes between distribution and social exchange.