Being with one another

Towards a media phenomenology of sharing

Abstract

The first problem encountered by many in approaching the subject of sharing is its lack of distinction. “The majority of daily sharing of food, money, and possessions goes unnoticed and is invisible to most people for whom it is routine,” consumer researcher Russell Belk observes. This inconspicuousness of sharing makes it difficult to theorize in any objectifying way: according to the hypothesis I wish to suggest, there is no object here that science could examine, no behavior that is distinct enough to be objectively studied, or work new enough to be exhibited. Therefore, enquiring into the concept of sharing will need to pass through the lens of the everyday: that which tends to pass unnoticed. As an aspect of the everyday (as in the French quotidian), sharing can then be considered not as a specific action or form of communication that appears in front of a neutral background, but as written in the “prose of the world,” as Hegel called the everyday experience. Prose is language in its ordinary form, not privileged in any way, that against which poetry is the exception.