Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life

Jenny Kennedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351054768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Aspects sociaux de l'informatique

Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life provides nuanced accounts of the processes of sharing in digital culture and the complexities that arise in them. The book explores definitions of sharing, and the roles that our digital devices and the platforms we use play in these practices.

Drawing upon practice theory to outline a theoretical framework of sharing practice, the book emphasizes the need for a coherent and consistent framework of sharing in digital culture and explains what this framework might look like. With insightful descriptions, the book draws out the relationship of sharing to privacy and control, the labored strategies and boundaries of reciprocation, and our relationships with the technologies which mediate sharing practices.

The volume is an essential read for researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students in Media and Communication, New Media, Sociology, Internet Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Section I

1
Pervasive Narratives of Sharing in Digital Culture

Introduction

On the 31 October 2006, the project manager for the newly developed share functionality on Facebook, Chris Hughes, wrote on the platform’s public blog,

Starting today, there are links to share on Facebook planted all across the Internet, from the articles at Time to the videos at Photobucket. Look for links like this all over the Web, making it easy for you to share.

(2006a)

Hughes, a founding member of Facebook, was known as ‘the empath’ in Facebook circles for his intuition of users rather than code. He saw Facebook as an opportunity to help people share information most efficiently (McGirt 2009). The timing of his announcement was significant. From that point on, share buttons spread like wildfire in online content and apps. While it was a watershed moment, the proliferation of share rhetoric in social media platforms had actually been building for some years; Hughes’s 2006 post was in the midst of the adoption period of this terminology (John 2013).

More significant than the timing of this development was the framing of the sharing rhetoric. Hughes’s second Facebook blog post was titled ‘Sharing is Daring’ (Hughes 2006b), a pun on the well-worn maxim ‘sharing is caring’. Hughes drew on social sensibilities of goodwill by evoking the imagined narrative of a schoolteacher’s lesson when he remarked that ‘as a mark of due respect to all the kindergarten teachers of the world, go forth and share’ while emphasising the boldness (and then newness) in the provocative action of a dare. This framing established by Hughes continued and came to capture the ethos of Facebook. In 2010, Face-book founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg emphasised the framing of sharing as affective connectivity, stating in one of his few posts on the blog,

When we started Facebook, we built it around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. When you have control over what you share, you want to share more. When you share more, the world becomes more open and connected.

(2010)

Zuckerberg structured sharing as positive, ‘open’ communication and ‘connected’ sociability. It was markedly similar to other social media platform statements of the time, such as Twitter’s, which also exaggerated the role the platforms play in bringing people together:

Whether across the world or across the street, Twitter—and more broadly, technology—allows people to view the world through each other’s eyes. As a result, we are able to share information and communicate more easily than any time in our past, bringing the world closer.

(Chowdhury 2011)

Social media platforms heavily utilised this ‘open’ and ‘connected’ structuring of meaning. The parlance of sharing was purposively harnessed as a way of initiating familiarisation with the practices digital intermediaries afford—socialising with friends and loved ones, networking with others over shared concerns and navigating stories from around the world.

Social media platforms encouraged sharing by employing the term to draw on social imaginaries of connectivity. As powerful political players, platforms were able to construct an imaginary of digital subjects, where being a good neoliberal subject meant sharing through socialisation, networking and navigating. Good subjects posted, updated, liked, tweeted, retweeted and, most important, shared. The dominant rhetoric indicated that it was a social responsibility to be available online.

Mythologies of the Internet

While social media platforms dominated the social imaginary of digital culture at the turn of this century, sharing in earlier internet culture was imagined to be a practice oriented towards developing and maintaining social hierarchies and reputations. Speaking on the social provenance of the internet in the late 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee wrote, ‘The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information’ (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 1999).

Early computers were expensive and typically shared by users who developed their programs on punch cards while waiting in turn for access. In the 1950s, a new process allowed users to access a single computer with the impression of simultaneous and uninterrupted interaction. The human–computer interaction occurred by rotating through the interacting sequences of multiple users to continuously maximise the capacity of a mainframe computer (Hauben and Hauben 1996; Abbate 1999). This process, called time-sharing, allowed for the economic and equitable distribution of common resources.

Launched in 1969, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was a military funded network of time-sharing computers mostly based in universities (Hafner and Lyon 1996; Rosenzweig 1998). Some describe ARPANET as an early peer-to-peer network which birthed the internet through open systems of collective intelligence with identifiable peers providing access to shared resources, motivated by the imaginations of a select few (Malone, Laubacher and Dellarocas 2009). Alternative histories of the internet emphasise the politics of its military origins and application (Sterling 1993; Moschovitis, Poole and Senft 1999; Clarke 2004) or its manifestation from precursive technologies (see Milne 2010, p. 138). Nevertheless, the rationale for building the network was to share resources (Leiner et al. 2009, p. 25).

While early users respected the principles of ARPANET, the lack of a perceived common purpose meant that many saw it simply as a money-saving exercise by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and an intrusion on local researcher requirements. Lawrence Roberts, program manager and office director at the ARPA, describes this clash of intentions as follows:

[T]he universities were being funded by us, and we said, “We are going to build a network and you are going to participate in it. And you are going to connect it to your machines. … So over time we started forcing them to be involved, because the universities in general did not want to share their computers with anybody. They wanted to buy their own machines and hide in the corner. … Although they knew in the back of their mind that it was a good idea and were supportive on a philosophical front, from a practical point of view, they … wanted their own machine. It was only a couple years after they had gotten on it [ARPANET] that they started raving about how they could now share research, and jointly publish papers, and do other things that they could never do before. All of which was a great boon to them and the artificial intelligence community for sharing information.

(cited in Norberg 1989)

Amidst the tension of coercion and reluctance, the development of networking technologies was socially constituted. Indeed, as Janet Abbate (1999) attests, the development of the internet was ‘a tale of collaboration and conflict among a remarkable variety of players’ which demonstrated ‘how technologies are socially constructed’ (p. 3). Examining early histories of the internet reveal that while the internet may now be conceived of as a cohesive, well-defined technology, initially it was shaped through the intersection of many divergent forces—political, social and cultural (for fuller accounts of internet history including the development of specific technological protocols, see Hauben and Hauben 1996; Abbate 1999; Goggin 2004; Banks 2008).

The serendipitous emergence of email shifted the focus of collaboration from resource sharing to communication. Initially used to convey messages to users of the same computer as early as 1965 (i.e., Massachusetts Institute for Technology’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, CTSS), the first networked email was sent in 1972. Email introduced a social dimension to the ARPANET, at odds with the interests of the funding institution: ‘once the first couple of dozen nodes were installed, email users turned the system of linked computers into a personal as well as a professional communication tool’ (Hafner and Lyon 1996, p. 189). Science fiction author and critic Bruce Sterling elaborates further:

By the second year of operation […] an odd fact became clear. ARPANET’s users had warped the computer-sharing network into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidised electronic post-office. […] Not only were they using ARPANET for person-to-person communication, but they were very enthusiastic about this particular service—far more enthusiastic than they were about long-distance computation.

(1993, n.p.)

By 1973, email accounted for three-quarters of all ARPANET traffic (Hafner and Lyon 1996, p. 194). While the ARPANET sharing imaginary at the time of development focused on resource efficiency, the practices of users exerted a profound paradigm shift that was not anticipated. Les Earnest, a computer scientist at Stanford University, notes,

I was surprised at the way the use of email took off, but so were the others who helped initiate that development … We thought of [the ARPANET] as a system for resource sharing and expected that remote login and file transfers would be the primary uses.

(cited in Abbate 1999, p. 232, endnotes)

Instead, sharing via email and mailing list was used to develop a sense of community and relational ties between ARPANET users. Databases contained lists of topics such as science fiction, which allowed individuals to not only communicate with large groups but also to develop a community identity among geographically disparate people. Increasingly, the resources of the ARPANET were seen to be the community of users rather than the use of remote devices or access to specific programs.

This social dimension of email also drew on existing perceptions of social hierarchies of power. Stephen Lukasik, who directed ARPA from 1971 to 1975, was himself an early advocator of email, and this influenced the practices of those working under him. Program managers perceived that they could develop closer ties with Lukasik by using email and could gain certain advantages in the workplace, such as budgetary rewards. Consequently at ‘ARPA’s headquarters, the appeal of the network had nothing to do with computers and everything to do with access to power’ (Abbate 1999, p. 108).

Even in the early 1970s, illicit file and software sharing as a regular practice in the ARPANET. Earnest recalls the development of file-sharing practices:

[A] thing that happened a lot in the 1970s was benign theft of software. We didn’t protect our files and found that both programs and data migrated around the net rather quickly, to the benefit of all. For example, I brought the first spelling checker into existence around 1966 but it wasn’t picked up by anyone else, whereas the improved version (around 1971) quickly spread via ARPANET throughout the world.

(pers. comm cited in Abbate 1999, p. 101)

Initial sharing of software took place within the closed communities of those who had access to ARPANET. In the early 1970s, computer researchers did not imagine many other people were using their network. Sharing software was a way of developing relationships within their (limited) community with expectations of mutual participation and reciprocity. The files and software shared were perceived to be part of the commons of the community.

During this pre-internet period, the network was still relatively inaccessible to those outside of the pioneering research communities. Built by technologists and researchers, it was also built for technologists and researchers and relied on comprehension of access commands and data ranges (Baym 2010). Although the network structure reflected intentions to promote resource sharing through ‘open architecture networking’ (Leiner et al. 2009, p. 24), access to such structures were limited.

The first significant areas for popular networked sharing were Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and USENET. BBSes provided early public access to networked communities. The first public BBSes were established in 1978 by computer hobbyists Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who met through the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange (CACHE). Users accessed BBSes over a phone line using a modem, meaning they no longer required access to a mainframe computer to participate. BBSes functioned as repositories of files and software and allowed communities of users to read notices and exchange messages similar to contemporary internet forums.

USENET—established in 1979 as a ‘poor man’s ARPANET’ (Quarter-man 1990, p. 243)—used the protocols of mailing lists to post messages to discussion networks known as newsgroups (Hauben and Hauben 1996). USENET provided a means of linking those shut out of the ARPANET community. Unlike BBSes, USENET was decentralised, meaning it did not have a centralised server and did not require a dedicated administrator. Any user could create a newsgroup and users could select which newsgroups they wished to participate in. The functionality of sharing computation had been further adapted for communication:

Computer users flocked to USENET because it offered new possibilities for social interaction, bringing together “communities of interest” whose members might be geographically dispersed and allowing people to participate anonymously if they chose.

(Abbate 1999, p. 201)

Systems for sharing such as BBSes and USENET were developed by users for users, based on existing networking protocols, and it was expected that they would manifest characteristics in keeping with the attributes of community: shared interests, ongoing participation, common resources, reciprocity and shared language (Whittaker, Isaacs and O’Day 1997, p. 137)...