Modern Society Affects Our Sharing Habits

In almost all aspects of our existence, sharing plays a central part. From parents taking care of their newborns, and providing them with everything they need, to helping a stranger on the street, the habit has shaped over millennia who we are and how we interact with each other. A recently published investigation has looked at how the modern world influences this behavior in our species, and has tried to unravel the complex mechanisms behind it, ScienceDaily reports.

The research, which appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, essentially shows that societal changes affect the very nature of sharing as we know it. “Sharing is a fundamental consumer behavior that we have either tended to overlook or to confuse with commodity exchange and gift giving,” Russell Belk, an expert at the York University, in Toronto, and also the author of the study, explains in the paper. One of the main focuses of his investigation is to assess the differences between sharing, gift-giving, and exchanging marketplace commodities.

“Rather than absolute distinctions, I see these as categories that share fuzzy boundaries. Although both sharing and gift-giving have some elements that often (but not always) make them more communal, loving, and caring than marketplace exchange, sharing differs from gift-giving in that it is non-reciprocal. The infant who receives his or her mother's nurturing care and sustenance does not incur a debt. Nor does the child who receives food, shelter, and love from parents receive an itemized bill upon leaving the nuclear family home,” Belk shares in the study.

He believes that some of the threats on existing sharing habits may be identified in the restriction of public television, the decline of public school systems, as well as the individualization of phones and meals, for example, when traditional families no longer have a dinner time when all members sit together and bond. Rather, teenagers eat in their rooms, while watching TV or playing on the computer, whereas the parents still stick to the “old ways” and eat in the dining room.

“I suggest that two keys to promoting contemporary sharing are an expanded sense of self that embraces other people more than other things and a greater sense of 'sharing in,' where possessions are seen as ours rather than mine and yours,” Belk proposes. He says that initiatives such as open-access encyclopedia sites, bulletin and message boards, as well as social networking sites represent a good example of how the Internet promotes sharing. The expert adds that this type of initiatives should also be extended in real life, not only in a virtual environment.