The Age of Sharing

Nicholas A. John

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509512294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Sharing is central to how we live today: it is what we do online; it is a model of economic behaviour; and it is also a type of therapeutic talk. Sharing embodies positive values such as empathy, communication, fairness, openness and equality. The Age of Sharing shows how and when sharing became caring, and explains how its meanings have changed in the digital age. But the word sharing also camouflages commercial or even exploitative relations. Websites say they share data with advertisers, although in reality they sell it, while parts of the sharing economy look a great deal like rental services. Ultimately, it is argued, practices described as sharing and critiques of those practices have common roots. Consequently, the metaphor of sharing now constructs significant swathes of our social practices and provides the grounds for critiquing them; it is a mode of participation in the capitalist order as well as a way of resisting it. Drawing on nineteenth-century literature, Alcoholics Anonymous, the American counterculture, reality TV, hackers, Airbnb, Facebook and more, The Age of Sharing offers a rich account of a complex contemporary keyword. It will appeal to students and scholars of the internet, digital culture and linguistics.

1
Introduction

In late 2015 an informal after-work event was held in Manhattan's Lower East Side for high-tech entrepreneurs in the sharing economy. One of the panelists was discussing different models of sharing. Some are based on sharing for free, she said, while others involve sharing for money. I waited for someone to raise their hand and challenge the speaker, but no one seemed put out by the sentence they had just heard. I had come across the idea of ‘sharing for money’ before. When I first encountered it I wondered whether it was not a simple contradiction in terms, like ‘selling for free’. Or perhaps this was a classic example of ideology at work through language, where a word with positive associations is deployed in order to conceal the true exploitative order of things. But pointing to the misuse or even wilful abuse of the word ‘sharing’ is too easy and fails to contend with its shifting senses and multiple layers of meaning. The fact that someone could say ‘sharing for money’ and be understood by her audience, and the retort that the exchange of money negates the possibility of sharing, both require historical and cultural contextualization. The following pages are my efforts to do just that.

As a first step, we might observe how much sharing people seem to be doing these days. When we go online we share – photos, status updates, thoughts, memes, opinions, information. We are sharing offline too: witness the growth of the sharing economy. Powered by apps, people are sharing their spare rooms, cars, power drills, free time, expertise, couches, workspaces, dinner leftovers and pets. We are also sharing when we talk about our emotions, which we do more often and in more situations than any previous generation. Some people are taught how to communicate this way from a very young age: American preschoolers, for instance, sit in ‘sharing circles’, where they talk about their unique experiences while their classmates listen, awaiting their turn to share.

At the same time, the use of the word ‘sharing’ to describe some of these activities is contested. For example, certain critics of the sharing economy say that ‘it isn't really sharing, it's renting/selling/trading’. Similarly, one might observe that Facebook does not share data with advertisers (though that is the language Facebook uses); rather, they sell it. Before engaging with these critical claims, though, I suggest that the very fact they are being made is indicative that something is at stake: the concept of sharing itself.

This is the age of sharing, then, because ‘sharing’ stands for both the cutting edge of our digital media-saturated capitalist society and economy, including the way we interact online, and a critical position vis-à-vis this society and economy. Sharing is both supportive and subversive of hegemonic (digital) culture: supportive in that the more you share updates and pictures on social media, for instance, the wealthier those platforms become, and subversive in that the more you share actual stuff with others, the less everyone needs to buy. Moreover, some say that sharing – be that of the distributive or communicative kind – leads to true and deep human connections.

In this book I will not be taking a stand on when the word ‘sharing’ is being used properly. In fact, my inquiries into sharing show that, as with many words, its ‘proper’ meanings and uses have changed quite drastically over time. For those who think that sharing is timeless, this discovery can be both surprising and perhaps a little destabilizing. In the following pages I show how the idea that sharing is the basis for authentic human relationships dates back no further than the 1930s, when city life, and especially advertising, were raising profound questions about authentic personhood. Moreover, the altruistic sense of sharing, or ‘sharing as caring’, only really took root from the 1970s. By tracing changes in the meanings of ‘sharing’ – and especially the entrenchment in the mid-2000s of its sense as what we do online – this book shows that the prevailing uses of the term today, and the criticisms of these uses, have common roots in a sense of self moulded by capitalism. Thus, while remaining agnostic as to the ‘proper’ way to use the word ‘sharing’, I am nonetheless alert both to the role played by powerful social media companies in disseminating one of its newer meanings, and to the interest these companies have in being associated with the concept's prosocial connotations.

Sharing is a very emotive concept: to start, it is deeply associated with childhood, and learning to ‘share nicely’ is one of the most basic skills preschoolers are expected to assimilate; second, and relatedly, sharing is always good – you cannot share non-nicely. Sharing, we are told, is caring, and, as such, has a warm glow around it. This warm glow also invites an ironic stance, as expressed in Figure 1.1: calling something sharing (in pretty colours to boot) can conceal its immorality; if we call it sharing, we might be able to get away with anything. This cartoon thus neatly captures a feature of sharing that is key to this book: it is both a practice or set of practices with ethical dimensions, and at the same time a word with ethical connotations. This book aims to explore them both.

Figure 1.1 Sharing is caring; Cyanide and Happiness, © Explosm.net, <http://explosm.net/comics/2432>

Three spheres of sharing form the focal points of this book: sharing as the constitutive activity of social media; sharing as a model for economic behaviour; and sharing as a category of speech. In this way, the book has something to say about our technologically mediated social lives; about our economic lives as producers and consumers; and about our emotional, interpersonal lives. At first glance, these spheres are quite distinct, and there would not seem to be a prima facie reason for bringing them together. Is it enough that the word ‘sharing’ is associated with each of them? I argue that it is, because ‘sharing’ is an important part of how these practices are constructed and conceptualized; it is a metaphor in terms of which different spheres of sharing construct one another and themselves. This is represented graphically in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 The spheres of sharing

When we talk about sharing we implicitly or explicitly engage with a set of values. Later on, I shall demonstrate and elaborate on the ways that each of the three spheres of sharing discussed here enacts certain values. For now, suffice it to say that when we talk about sharing we are talking about purportedly prosocial behaviours that promote, or are claimed to promote, greater openness, trust and understanding between people. Hence, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, can say that sharing (on Facebook) makes the world a more connected place; sharing economy evangelists promote sharing as a remedy for the ills of selfish and destructive hyper-capitalism (Botsman and Rogers, 2010); and Donal Carbaugh defines the speech category of sharing as talk with a ‘relational embrace’ (Carbaugh, 1988).

It is the contention of this book that sharing, both as a broad category of social practices, and as the word used to describe a wide range of practices, is on the rise. Ours is the age of sharing.

What is Sharing?

There are many ways to answer this question. One is to inquire into the difference between sharing and other modes of resource management, such as buying (Belk, 2010) or lending (Larrimore, Li, Larrimore, Markowitz and Gorski, 2011). When answering the question this way we endeavour to isolate the characteristics of ‘sharing-ness’ in which acts of sharing partake. Then, equipped with these characteristics, we can decide whether or not to bestow the title of ‘sharing’ on different activities and argue with others over its aptness in different contexts. These arguments are played out in the field of file sharing, for instance, where we may hear comments such as ‘It's not really sharing, it's online theft’. By talking of ‘pseudo-sharing’, Russell Belk engages in a somewhat similar strategy (Belk, 2014). But this is not what I mean when I ask what sharing is, and the objective of this book is not to demarcate its boundaries such that certain acts by definition fall beyond what may be considered as sharing. This is not to say that such an approach cannot be nuanced, and I recognize the complexities posed by borderline cases, but with that approach there is an intellectual push for a definition or conceptualization that can be used to categorize different practices and, as I have already intimated, that is not the direction in which I am pushing.

By contrast, the non-prescriptive approach adopted here starts by asking what kinds of things are called ‘sharing’ in practice. Indeed, my own interest in sharing began after noticing, at some point in 2010, that the word ‘share’ was all over the internet. This observation sparked my sociological imagination, and led me in search of other practices that are called ‘sharing’. So if one way of understanding the question ‘What is sharing?’ is to see it as asking what falls within a predefined category and what does not, when I ask what sharing is I am asking which social actions and phenomena we actually call ‘sharing’. This is the difference between asking ‘What practices should we call sharing?’, which is prescriptivist, and ‘What practices do we call sharing?’, which is what linguists would call a pragmatic approach.

There are a number of good reasons for preferring the latter to the former, and one reason for nonetheless keeping the former in mind throughout. The first and main reason for inquiring into the practices that we call ‘sharing’ (rather than asking whether use of that term is justified or not in different contexts) is that whatever else it is, ‘sharing’ is a metaphor, and when dealing with metaphorical usage the question of whether ‘x really is y’ is moot (the performer did not really bring the roof down; my erudite friend is not really a walking dictionary). The fact that diverse practices are termed ‘sharing’ should be taken as an opportunity to explore how various spheres of life are constructed through the use of metaphors from other spheres. One answer to the question ‘What is sharing?’ might thus be: sharing is a metaphor we live by (G. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).

This is not to say that the literal, non-metaphorical meaning of sharing should not interest us. It should, because it will help us unpack the subsequent metaphorical uses as well as leading to insights as to what might be implied by the notion of sharing. The original meaning of ‘sharing’ is given by the Oxford English Dictionary as dividing, or splitting. When understood this way, the linguistic proximity between ‘shearing’ and ‘sharing’ is suddenly obvious. Similarly, we thus realize that a ‘ploughshare’ is so called not because it was shared by all of the villagers, but because it shared, or rent asunder, the earth.¹ This sense of division is central to the early meaning of sharing, and also to our naive understanding of the concept: sharing is when you let others have some of what's yours. Shari...