What Makes Us Share?

Something I've never never thought about until this subject came up in class is why do I share the things I do? What makes me want to share them? On the outside it may seem simple to look at this question and say that we just share things that we like or want to promote. The deeper you dig into this concept the more questions continue to appear. So, today I'm going to try and look into some topics and digest a few theories from the beginning of the book "Spreadable Media,"

What Makes Us Share or Retweet Someone Else's Post?

When we see something that speaks to us or we can relate with we instantly share it. If this is something we see in ourselves or with something we've gone through I think we share it (publicly on social media) because we're under the impression it could help someone else. Another look at this would be if we share some sad quote about how it feels to be lonely to have someone draw attention to us and ask how we're doing. Isn't this the point of socials anyways to draw attention or make others think we're a better person than we actually feel we are? There's a satisfaction we get from letting others know how we're feeling whether it's happy or sad sometimes. I think this need to share emotions developed in my generation especially because we've gone through the majority of our lives with social media. Growing this consistent urge to be felt, understood, or simply seen our entire lives. Due to the fact that we're always needing to let the world know how we're doing or what we're doing it's become engrained in our brains that we have no point in doing something if it can't be shared. We have no satisfaction in doing things for ourselves or keeping our memories to ourselves because we have this urge to share everything for it to feel like we really did it. 

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Now let's steer away from the boo hoo and look at me emotions we try to put out there when displaying ourselves. When taking this topic upon myself I looked at my twitter to try and analyze some things and I realized why do I share all of these sports highlights? It's not like I'm gaining likes or retweets directly to my own page. I'd like to think I simply share them just because I think they're impressive but all this analyzing of how we want to appear got me thinking, do we retweet this things because it makes our page look better if we're 'big sports fans'? When we retweet something I think we're at times not just sharing but doing it for the influence of our personal page. I'm a big meme guy too, whether I'm sharing them in group chats or on my page. Although I may have not made the post I do get the credit when someone says something I shared made someone laugh. Do I enjoy doing this because unconsciously I get the satisfaction of people thinking I'm funny for finding it, because of the odd and often unseen tendencies we get from our social media obsession I can't even truly answer that. 

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I hate to do it but let's get a little political, or at least analyze how or why many other people choose to get political via social media. Personally, I hate this I'm not a very political person in general. This doesn't mean I don't have views or opinions on things but I just don't feel the need to share them, press them upon anyone, or argue with anyone about anything political. We all love to point the finger at the older generation about how often they do this on Facebook, but I do see a lot of my peers do it as well. Maybe it seems so questionable to me why they share political stuff on Facebook because I literally do not care at all, not even a little. I'm also not sorry for saying that, again, not even a little. I assume part of this has to do with sharing who they are, I mean if you don't force your views upon the world, do you even have political views? Oh wait, there we are with having to share something on our socials for it to be real. I assume these things could also be shared because of how passionate people get about them, but for the love of all things Godly can we stop with the Facebook posts that say "Share this if you believe Nancy Pelosi shouldn't be in the White House" or for the opposite party "Bernie Sanders is the best fit to run this country, share if you agree." No matter what political party you are with, these post are super corny. Although I feel this way this is spreadable content for the majority of the older people on Facebook, because they are so passionate about their views and with he mix of social media implied emotions, I think they literally cannot handle not sharing it. 

When speaking on each of the topics I covered today I was able to come to the same conclusion almost in every situation I could think. Due to our link to social media's, the ability to manage our image with these profiles, and the growing obsession to show everyone everything we unconsciously question if we actually did something or have a stance on something if we don't share it. Similar to our craving for taking pictures of everything, if it's not on a page did it really happy? Is it really the way we feel?