If I asked you to borrow money, you would likely be uncomfortable on some level – even if you fall within my closest social circles. But if I asked you to send me some stats that you shared on your blog last week, you might feel less uncomfortable. Why?
Clay Shirky’s SXSW session (Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature and Digital Data) covered social sharing and why we do it (or why we don’t.) Sharing something physical takes effort. Sharing goods means you’re likely going to have to give something up to share it with someone else. Sharing services doesn’t necessarily mean you physically have to give something 
up, but it still takes some effort. However, when it comes to information sharing, it’s so easy to do that you may feel bad/guilty if you don’t do it.
We know how to handle scarcity, he said, but “when things become abundant, the price goes away – things become available to everyone. It changes the world people operate in.” Things we previously thought of as scarce are now essentially new products and we don’t know how to value them.
Think about where the music industry is today and where it was 15 years ago. The product they had created was little plastic discs – music itself wasn’t the product. Once Napster hit peoples’ desktops, music became shareable information. Instead of sharing a good or service, you were able to share music files with no real cost to you. Shirky thinks that Napster became such a big hit so quickly because we are biased to feel good when we share information with one another, and sharing these informational files of music was no different.
In this digital age, it’s easier and easier each day to share information with each other – we do this via blogging, via Twitter, via texts, etc. Many of these tools that we use to share information today weren’t available 10 years ago. But where does the future lie? On some level, there are still qualms about sharing information… How does intellectual property play into it? I’m betting we’ll see a lot more of Creative Commons in the future.
What are your thoughts? Will social sharing take over and become more widespread?