We Are All Being Shared
From primarily being actors in the sharing process, masses have become more as this process’s new commodity in the market of Social Media.
Sharing is not a behavior newly introduced to mankind. Also, sharing has always been a concept accompanied with positive connotations: “Sharing is caring”, “Power is gained by sharing knowledge not hoarding it”, “A joy that is shared is a joy made double”… However, sharing in the age of Social Media has took further dimensions that transcend humane values of caring and joy, i.e. economic values of surveillance and consequently profit.
Sharing is not a principle that is part of a culture, it is in itself a culture that has existed whenever and wherever humans existed. It can take the form of sharing goods (e.g. food, clothes, tools ) or sharing knowledge, emotions, and information. Cave paintings are one of the oldest forms of sharing messages. It then seemed that people sought mobile and trans-borders means of sharing data: messenger pigeons, town criers, telegraph cables, then newspapers. Later, powerful mass media channels were invented: radios, televisions, and satellites. This is not merely history. There are driving forces and social needs among humans that are impelling these developments: sharing, connecting, bonding, and cooperating.
However, the major revolution concerning the act of sharing began with the Internet, precisely Social Media websites and applications. With it, new values and principles seem to be replacing and dominating over the traditional meaning of sharing (as simply an act of exchange of values or trade of assets) both on the individual level and on the intertwined social/economic levels.
These new principles are nothing but economic doctrines of commerce and profit. “Where there are people, there are markets, and the Internet […] had the potential to offer up something that mass media broadcast technologies could not: a source of highly detailed information about audiences” (Hinton & Hjorth, n.d., p. 12). This quote implies the economic values of surveillance and profit -previously mentioned- that are hidden behind the general value of sharing claimed by Social Media owners.
First, on the level of individuals, i.e. users of Social Media platforms, the meaning of certain concepts and expressions has been blurred. Anciently, when one liked something, it naturally meant that this person admired this thing. Does the example seem pointless? Well, let’s think about it this way: what does it mean now when one likes a post of someone who has died, a post of a war scene, or of a natural disaster? Certainly, the purpose of sharing such posts is not arousing admiration. The purpose, as anciently was and should be, is to inform others and receive condolences from family and friends. So how is the genuine value of sharing emotions manifested by clicking the Like button despite what the content of a post is?
This problem, and its possible solution, was suggested by Chris Cox, the social network’s chief product officer in Facebook, when he “dropped a bomb: They needed to do something about the “like” button” (Frier, 2016).
The solution he proposed to allow people to share their true feelings is a set of 6 human emotions that are considered to be most common, and labelled the set as “Reactions: angry, sad, wow, haha, yay, and love” (Frier, 2016).
These are examples of sharing emotions on social media and the way the meaning of traditional expressions and feelings have been blurred. However, individuals do not only share emotions on Social Media, but also information, news, interests, thoughts, and experiences.
However, all these individual acts of sharing: pressing the Like button, posting about certain occasions, interests or experiences, pressing the actual Share button to further distribute a content, or following a page or account- which all seem independent personal choices taken by each and every user of Social Media simply to ‘share’ content with others- are critically being seen as integrated into a more complex economic structure that is no longer shiny and gold.
The natural human act of sharing that is now practiced on Social Media (though not genuinely) “is also a model that has been (again) co-opted by market forces. The initial enthusiasm about online sharing and its importance to social bonding and community-building has met with technology-augmented enclosure, surveillance and profiteering” (Skågeby, 2015).
As depicted by the above picture, interactions taking place in the realm of Social Media are the currency being exchanged. In other words, the commodity being exchanged in this market is audience attention (Skågeby, 2015) that manifests itself in the number of likes,dislikes, shares, or posts. Whether it’s being compared to currency or commodities , audience attention is the data being aggregated to study patterns of behaviors in this wide network. Packages of these data are then sold to advertisers which in turn begin the process of distributing posts and suggestions that ‘not coincidentally’ meet our tastes. We use Social Media, tools of surveillance aggregate our actions, this data is sold to advertisers, advertisers pay, and Social Media owners increase their profits.
Therefore, Social media can be regarded in two ways: one as user-friendly and another as profit-friendly. After all, internet companies can be regarded as “embracing the user and giving them more control over what they can do online, (or) as a way for the same companies to gain more control over their operating environments by building better knowledge of their users” (Hinton & Hjorth, n.d., p. 30) and consequently sell this knowledge to advertisers.
This implies -in addition to a change in the core values of sharing and exchanging that were co-opted into an economic profit-driven structure- an imbalance in the distribution of both the power and benefits of Social Media with the owners seeming to win. However, these two positions represent extreme ends because one cannot also deny that Social Media does empower users in times yet in ‘exchanged’ with a certain price that is still to be determined (Hinton & Hjorth, n.d., p. 30). A price that should take into consideration the moral values of the act of sharing, the privacy of users, the process of exchange, and the realization that users are humans expressing themselves not commodities to be sold. Each value imposes limits on the eCommerce principle that is invading Social Media and replacing the traditional principle of sharing.
Will these mediated trends of sharing and the notion that this social activity is being integrated into a complex economic structure affect the value of sharing in society at large? Well, even us -the users of Social Media- are sometimes regarding the number of likes or shares we get on our personal posts from an economic perspective as well.
Although we don’t actually receive profits, we seek or even strive to get the highest numbers of likes for a selfie picture as if it’ll make us richer. We might even tend to distribute likes on our friends posts to get their likes in return. Isn’t also weird that certain websites sell us likes? Isn’t clear that we’re 24 hours sharing and posting content to receive more likes? However, do we actually scroll down to identify who are the 400 people who liked our post? Are we really interested to check who are the people that saw it? Or is it just the number that matters? Are we sharing to share, connect, and bond? Or has this process been broken to: share, receive likes, and be a likes-billionaire?
Social Media platforms may be said to be tools for sharing. However, sharing, in its traditional humane sense, does imply positive actions of caring, bonding, and belonging to a group. These values are under the threat of being demolished by two economic aspects. The first is at the level of users whose act of sharing on Social Media is being driven by the economy of likes. This principle is undermining the value of connecting with people we care about- as the example of actually checking who are the 400 people that our posts have reached imply. The second aspect is at the level of the owners who are being more and more driven by the economy of surveillance (algorithms, shifts in behaviors, even personal questions about users’ social/intimate/economic statuses that users owe no one answers for). These two aspects are threatening the true values of sharing that instead of yielding a humane and knowledgeable ‘social’ capital, might be solely achieving an economically-driven capital.
References
Frier, S. (2016). Inside Facebook’s decision to blow up the like button.
Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-facebook-
reactions-chris-cox/
Hinton, S., & Hjorth, L. (n.d.). Understanding social media. SAGE, p. 8–31
Skågeby , J. (2015). The changing shape of sharing: Digital materiality and
moral economies. Retrieved from http://discoversociety.org/2015/03
/01/the-changing-shape-of-sharing-digital-materiality-and-moral-
economies/
