Sharing and social media: The decline of a keyword?

Abstract

This article revisits claims made a decade ago about the importance of the word “sharing” in the context of social network sites (SNSs). Based on an analysis of the home pages of 61 SNSs between the years 2011 and 2020, the findings incontrovertibly show that “sharing” has lost its central place in the terminology employed by social media platforms in their self-presentation. Where in the mid-2000s SNSs relied heavily on a rhetoric of sharing to promote their services, by 2020, this rhetoric had been almost entirely dropped. The research reported here implies that social media platforms no longer feel a need or desire to be associated with these cultural beliefs. Given this, questions are raised as to whether “sharing” remains a keyword for social media.

Share with care: negotiating children’s health and safety in sharenting practices

“…Nevertheless, parents are often not aware of how those very mechanisms of sharing which can undermine individual privacy and security, are the same which – overtly or covertly – allow success and existence of such social media platforms companies (e.g. Fuchs, 2013; Gillespie, 2010; John, 2013, 2022). For these reasons, we argue that sharenting practices observed by our study seem to be grounded in more complex social dynamics and cultural aspects, which depict more nuanced parenting ideals.…”

Assembling “Sides” of TikTok: Examining Community, Culture, and Interface through a BookTok Case Study

“…They can be adopted by platforms themselves to strategically position an app (Gillespie, 2018). They can also be suggestive to indicate how "proper" practice should be done on their sites (John, 2022). According to Annette Markham (2020), "the metaphors we use to frame our experiences of the internet.…”

“…Metaphor theory, as noted by Katrin Tiidenberg (2020), operates from "the (deceptively) simple premise that the way we talk about certain things shapes the way we think about them" (p. 15). The discursive power of words in online practice is well established (Gillespie, 2018;John, 2022;Tiidenberg, 2020), and interrogating side's construction and implications means paying attention to how this term gives TikTok communities form and legitimacy, while simultaneously obscuring other aspects. According to Kaye et al (2022), "To think of TikTok as a platform also requires us to investigate how its technological features, functions, and logic, interplay with, and respond to, different social and cultural practices" (p. 5).…”

Can We Really Have Nice Things? Preparing for the Metaverse

“…Second Life (SL) came to our attention at a time when Web 2.0 -and its related buzzwords and values, i.e., participation, convergence, networks, and connection and sharing (Burgess, Green 2009;Castells 1996;John 2022;Jenkins 2006;Rider Murakami Woord 2019;van Dijck 2013) was still relatively new and unmonetized. To us, Linden Lab was, at the time, a rather faceless tech-company and we only learned about their product via a keynote speech at an academic conference (Lester 2007).…”