To Share On Social Media Is To Assert and Maintain Ownership

How sharing is about exciting envy in others

Of all the euphemisms that the online world employs, from “swipe left” (“reject”) to “beta” (“not working properly”), the term “share” must be one of the most revealing. When we share, what we really hope for is to acquire.

To “share your experience” online is to let other people know about it. It is the fundamental act that social media relies on. Sharing is to say or display something about yourself. It is a type of performance.

In a performance like this, one does not share an experience as one might share a cake or a car ride — that is, by relinquishing ownership by degrees, by dividing ownership among others.

To “share” on social media is to assert and maintain ownership, and this has important consequences for our sense of self online.

Through social media, we look and judge, and in return volunteer ourselves to be looked at and judged. As such, we tend to accept the judgments made of us because we also can play judge. It’s a quid pro quo deal.

What is normalized is the disparity between our online and offline selves. As we flaunt and exploit our online personas for the gratification of the actual voyeur within us, the divide widens. We watch ourselves being watched (to borrow an idiom from the art critic John Berger). In this, we hand over power to those who survey us — not to an individual or demarcated group, but to the abstract notion of the audience.

In social media, dialogue is not implied. Unlike other forms of communication — letters, emails, texts, or calls — that assume a two-way process, such agreement isn’t required with social media. After the initial connection, networks can endure for years without a plan for the frequency or direction of the exchange. The transactional nature of social media is not reported on, has no expectations. It is merely notional and indistinct.

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