THE BMW VIDEO CAMPAIGN WAS A FEAT OF SOCIAL ENGINEERING to mirror the mechanical marvels of the machines themselves. Featuring a ruggedly handsome leading man, glamorous women and luxury vehicles, the ads were designed to be shared. Made by a range of A-list directors and crammed with top talent, the videos spread across the Internet at breakneck speed and were an early indicator of how far a message could reach online. This was in 2001, before the rise of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Today, millions of people regularly devote part of their day to a similar online ritual for seemingly no reward. They take it upon themselves to pass on a cute photo, a funny video or stimulating news story to friends and family.
There are some things we just cannot resist passing on. They tap into our innate urge to interact with others. Whether they are videos, photos or headlines, they are engineered to play on our emotions and impel us to take certain actions—to click the Like button, to tweet or email. By understanding the emotions that drive our desire to share, we will be better equipped to make informed decisions about what we tell others and what we keep to ourselves on the digital networks woven into the way we communicate. Emotions can lead us astray, and even the urge to do good by sharing what we know, or believe we know, can have consequences we never imagined.
The BMW videos remain a touchstone in understanding how to create material that people want to watch and share. The carmaker had commissioned a series of eight short films, averaging about ten minutes in length. The Hire featured actor Clive Owen as a driver who transports people or goods from place to place in a BMW vehicle. For the talent behind the camera, BMW recruited leading directors, from John Frankenheimer to Ang Lee to Guy Ritchie. On screen, Owen shared the limelight with Mickey Rourke, Gary Oldman, Forest Whitaker, Don Cheadle, Madonna and supermodel Adriana Lima.
A mix of charismatic male actors, glamorous women, seasoned directors and money does not always guarantee success. But The Hire proved extraordinarily popular when it debuted online in April 2001. Over the next four months, the videos were watched eleven million times. Two million people registered with BMW’s website and 94 per cent of them emailed links to the film to others. The figures are astonishing for the early days of video sharing. More important for the carmaker, sales rose by 12 per cent. The films are seen as the first successful online video marketing campaign. But success came at a price. After eight films, more than 100 million views and DVD distribution in showrooms and accompanying issues of Vanity Fair, the high cost of the campaign led BMW to drop it in October 2005.
The success of the campaign provides clues to the psychology of sharing. The films provided compelling narratives, dripping with excitement and cool. They looked expensive because they were expensive. They were aimed at people who could discern quality, or at least thought they could. The hundreds of thousands who passed the videos on were doing more than entertaining their friends; they were signalling their sophisticated taste to their social circles. The media we share is an expression both of our personality and of our aspirations. BMW figured this out, basing its video campaign on knowledge of its audience. It knew that the age of its average customer was forty-six. Two-thirds of its customers were men in well-paid jobs, married with no children. They wanted to be Clive Owen, driving a plush car with Madonna in the back seat. As for the women, many of them probably wouldn’t have minded being driven around by him.
New technologies provide new channels for interactions that form the basis of society. The fact that we are social is old news. “Man is by nature a political animal,” said Aristotle. “He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” Social interaction sets humans apart from other animals. For social scientists, sharing food, experiences and knowledge is a fundamental aspect of these interactions. “Sharing has probably been the most basic form of economic distribution in hominid societies for several hundred thousand years,” wrote the anthropologist John Price in 1975.
The study of human evolution charts how we are more inclined to cooperate with others than try to go it alone. Early humans needed to work together and share knowledge as they left Africa and spread out across the world. Humans increased their odds of survival by foraging and hunting in groups, and then sharing the spoils among the group. According to anthropologists Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson and Joseph Henrich, “humans may be smarter than other creatures, but none of us is nearly smart enough to acquire all of the information necessary to survive in any single habitat.”
People are interested in news because news matters. News is driven by an innate need to be in the know and to know about things that might impact a way of life. Information is crucial to making informed decisions. Beyond the limits of our own knowledge, experience and awareness, we rely on others to fill in the gaps. Gathering and sharing news gave groups an inherent advantage, as an individual can only see and hear a fraction of the world. In early societies, telling fellow hunters to avoid a particular area because of the presence of a saber-toothed tiger is a form of risk reduction and reciprocal exchange. What one hunter is communicating to another is effectively, “I tell you today about the dangerous animal in the hope that you will share similar news in the future, so we both live longer.” The more such newsgathering and dissemination pays off, the more it becomes part of everyday behaviour.
Posting to Facebook, YouTube or any of the myriad social platforms isn’t a matter of life or death; it is a way of gifting something in the expectation of gaining something in return. Digital sharing is the latest expression of the ritual exchange of goods and information that fosters social capital, serving as the glue that helps societies prosper and endure. These interactions form the basis of the connections, common values and shared understandings that bind communities and engender trust. The idea of social capital was popularized by Robert Putnam in his 2000 bestseller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Putnam distinguished two forms: bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding takes place when we mix with people like us, such as family, close friends or people from similar backgrounds. Recommending a short film—say, one starring Clive Owen—is a way of exchanging bonding capital, cultivating a shared sense of identity. Bridging capital involves going beyond similar people and connecting with those with different backgrounds or views. Putnam argued that the two forms of social capital reinforce each other.
As children grow up, they become aware of the importance of social capital. Children who, as toddlers, throw tantrums when asked to share, learn to play nice when they reach age seven or eight. A team of researchers led by Ernst Fehr at the University of Zurich documented the process in children in the small medieval city of Rapperswil-Jona on the shores of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. The 229 children, aged from three to eight, participated in three experiments in sharing candy. Two children were partnered, with one of them in control of the sweets. In all three games, the child with the candy decided how to share it. In the first two, a child could choose to divide the sweets equally or to give their partner an extra piece.
The key experiment was the third one. For this one, the child with the candy could refuse to share and instead keep all the sweets. Given a choice, the overwhelming majority of toddlers—nine out of ten—chose not to give the other child a piece of candy. By age seven and eight, just under half chose to share one of the sweets. After taking into account all three experiments, the researchers concluded that, as children grew up, they are more likely to want to be fair and more consistently choose egalitarian outcomes.
Children learn to be more egalitarian as they progress from playgroups to kindergarten and on to formal schools. As they grow older, children will also become more aware of the opinions of others and start to care about what others think of them. By the time they are eight, they have learned that, as a society, we are expected to play nice. For children, sharing candy can be an important bonding ritual, just as sharing a meal is important for families and friends. These social interactions weave the fabric of community, as we give and receive non-financial social assets.
Online networks build on the social capital that comes from relationships and systems of support and influence. The ability to reach beyond immediate circles helps to develop other forms of capital that confer status and power. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu extended the notion of capital beyond the economic and social to also include cultural and symbolic capital. Educational or intellectual knowledge brings with it cultural capital, while symbolic capital comes from prestige or recognition. Taking part in online discussions or posting links to informative articles is a trade in cultural and symbolic capital that benefits both sides. The person providing the information receives profile and recognition for their expertise, while the audience gains knowledge and understanding.
Such professional capital is the currency of business-oriented social networks such as LinkedIn. Professional capital is a hybrid of social, cultural and symbolic capital. It does not come solely from sharing what we know or the information we’ve found. It is dependent on others recognizing that a contribution was particularly valuable through clicking on a link or recommending it to their social circles themselves. By making these transactions in plain sight online, we leave a digital trail that others can observe, examine and interpret.
A retweet, for example, confers symbolic capital on the contributor, as well as indicating what is important to us. Often on Twitter, people add a line to their profile stating that a retweet is not an endorsement. Who are they trying to kid? In practice, they are endorsing the message, but not necessarily agreeing with a particular point of view. Rather, a retweet is a way of signalling to others that this piece of information matters. By paying attention, the people on the receiving end are recognizing the value of the message, as well as adding to their professional capital by enriching their knowledge. In social networks, the act of listening is as significant as the act of conversing.
The desire to be heard is one of the five primary motivators for participating online. Everyone wants to be heard. The Internet provides an open mike, which one may use by engaging in conversations on forums or by posting a link on a social network. The Internet and social media platforms offer unparalleled opportunities as a soapbox for personal expression. Researchers who have studied online participation over the past decade have found that people value being able to express their opinions. In the early 2000s, a doctoral student called Jennifer Stromer-Galley interviewed people who contributed to online chat rooms on Usenet and Yahoo! The appeal of the chat rooms was the ability to reach a broad public at any time and any day of the week.
Stromer-Galley, now an associate professor at the University of Syracuse, also looked at why people liked to discuss politics online. Unsurprisingly, people liked being able to voice their views. At times, speaking out online is about letting off some steam. A quick glance at the comment section of a news website or at tweets about a controversial issue can give the impression that people are simply venting. This was one of the findings of a study of British and Israeli commenters. For some, comments were a way to rant about the news. But the value to most was having the space to express their point of view. Sharing our ideas with others is a way of showing what is important to us. We are sending out signals about ourselves as we highlight what we value and care about.
The role of sharing in defining ourselves emerged loudly in a study by The New York Times. The “Gray Lady” partnered with Latitude Research to dig into the psychology of sharing, combining in-person interviews in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, week-long panels and a survey of 2,500 online sharers. Two-thirds of the participants shared to give others a better sense of who they were and what they cared about. The spreading of news, information and commentary through social networks are symbolic declarations of the self. Social psychologists define such actions as identity claims that signal to others how we would like to be seen.
Clothing has long been a medium for symbolic declarations of identity. In Elizabethan England, laws were enacted to curb the sumptuousness of dress. Known as sumptuary laws, they dictated who could wear certain styles, fabrics and colours. In one proclamation, on August 13, 1597, Queen Elizabeth I ordered that only earls and knights could wear purple. There were more edicts on apparel during her reign than at any other time in English history. Before people starting dissecting the outfits of the rich and famous on social media, there was a real Elizabethan fashion police whose purpose was to control such symbols of the self.
The sumptuary laws served two purposes. One was to stop people spending money on frivolous displays of wealth. The other was to maintain class structures by making it simple to identify someone’s social station by their dress. The material we share online serves as the digital clothing of identity. We aim for an idealized projection of ourselves through the selective choice of what we share, when, where and with whom. By publishing information on the Internet, we are trying to influence the impressions formed by others. Sharing becomes a means to shape how others see us. “I try to share only information that will reinforce the image I’d like to present: thoughtful, reasoned, kind, interested and passionate about certain things,” said one of the men interviewed for The New York Times study.
Much of the information shared on social networks is “all about me.” When Rutgers University researchers looked at the accounts of more than 350 Twitter users, they found most people talked about themselves or their views. The “meformers” accounted for 80 per cent of the Twitter users. These results may seem to suggest that social networks bring out the narcissist in us. But the thing is that we just love to talk about ourselves in everyday conversation. Between 30 and 40 per cent of everyday talk is devoted to telling others about our thoughts and experiences. The difference is how we react to the same comments on different media. Everyday conversation is a dynamic mix of experience, knowledge, opinion, fiction and fantasy. Mundane details about what we had for lunch or what happened to us on the way to work just seem more acceptable in passing chat that is ephemeral and transient than when the same information is recorded and distributed online.
Meformers may seem self-indulgent, but it looks like we are just programmed that way. Harvard scientists Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell put this hypothesis to the test in a series of brain experiments. Using MRIs, they scanned the brains of test subjects to see if neural regions associated with reward lit up with they talked about their opinions and their proclivities. The results showed increased activity in parts of the brain that make up the mesolimbic dopamine system. This pathway carries dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centres. Talking about ourselves is intrinsically gratifying. The Harvard study found that test subjects would happily pass up monetary rewards to chat about their favourite subject: me, myself and I.
Talking about ourselves is good for society. It gives humans an adaptive advantage. Psychologists have looked at how sharing personal information kindles and strengthens social bonds, provides different perspectives and helps people learn more about themselves. Sociability is a core reason behind digital exchanges. The people in The New York Times study saw sharing as a way of maintaining and cultivating their relationships, helping them connect with others who have similar interests. Those who were cut off from their social circles online felt deprived. “I miss the companionship and conversations on Facebook,” said one man. “I feel like I’m probably missing out on some things with the connection.”
The social rewards of conversation are a common thread in research on online participation. People who talk politics online like hearing the opinions of others and chatting with people from different backgrounds. The folks who populate comment sections are also motivated by social interaction. For some, it’s about having a right old ding-dong, as this British commenter said: “I like to give opinions and read other opinions but most of all I love a good debate, whether in person or online any view is worth debating.” People taking part in such comment threads are driven by a desire to nourish relationships with others. Commenters responding to each other drive the debate. An analysis of comments left on the websites of two local newspapers in the UK found that one-third of the comments consisted of exchanges between readers.
Online exchanges are often criticized for their robust tone. A cursory glance at comment threads or a stream of tweets can suggest the posters are more interested in shouting at each other than in engaging with substantive ideas. The success of French tennis player Marion Bartoli at Wimbledon in 2013 led to a stream of misogynistic remarks on Twitter about her appearance. For some, Bartoli was not blonde or skinny enough to be a “Wimbledon babe.” Such misogyny was not restricted to social media, though. Veteran BBC sports commentator John Inverdale provoked outrage when he mused: “Do you think Bartoli’s dad told her when she was little, ‘You’re never going to be a looker, you’ll never be a Sharapova, so you have to be scrappy and fight?’ ” The crass comment came as Bartoli won her first Grand Slam title, beating Sabine Lisicki in straight sets. Never mind that it takes skill, strength and determination to become a Wimbledon champion.
The dynamics of how information travels online can foster a mob mentality. Social media doesn’t cause someone to make derogatory comments, but it does make such attitudes far more visible than ever before. The circulation of abuse through social networks fuels the psychological phenomenon of social proof, when people take their cue from the behaviour of others. Seeing others make derogatory remarks publicly may make it seem more acceptable to be rude and offensive. Social media is a mirror to the rise of sexism and misogyny in popular culture. The higher visibility of such improper behaviour has sparked a wider debate on why some men consider it acceptable to write about or talk about women in a sexually offensive way online.
At the same time, the very publicness of these spiteful exchanges means such undercurrents in society rise to the fore where they are subject to scrutiny and condemnation. The statement by U.S. Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants” applies as much today as it did when he wrote it in a 1913 Harper’s Weekly article entitled “What Publicity Can Do.” Malicious messages leave a digital trail that can make it easier to take action against the perpetrators. When the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez was bombarded with graphic threats of rape on Twitter in mid-2013, she took screengrabs of the tweets and passed them on to police. Criado-Perez had attracted the ire of Twitter trolls in July 2013 for her campaign get The Bank of England to agree to feature Jane Austen on the £10 note. After Criado-Perez appeared on TV welcoming the news, she received hundreds of abusive tweets. Six months later, two of the people who took part in the Twitter tirade against her were jailed in the U.K. for making extreme threats.
The reach and public nature of the Internet means ugly remarks are more wide-ranging and prominent than ever before. Examples such as the sexist tirades against Bartoli and Criado-Perez deservedly make headlines. Journalists themselves worry about abusive comments on their news websites from what one reporter described as “keyboard assassins.” They tend to think that most contributions from readers are ill-informed, stupid or just plain puerile. But the attention paid to high-profile cases of abuse can also create a misleading impression about the tenor of online sharing. Offensive remarks tend to have more salience in our minds, even if they are relatively few in number when compared with the millions of messages shared every day.
Sending a message from a keyboard over the air to an undetermined audience provides a sense of freedom that can lead one to make comments that should remain private thoughts. By the same token, that sense of freedom can provide a sense of self-fulfillment. “I feel free to say what I really feel without any fear of criticism or reservation,” said one of the respondents interviewed for a study on political talk online. “My feeling is it doesn’t matter what they say about my opinion because ‘they’ are words that appear on the screen, although I do consider what is said.”
Being able to say it out loud offers a sense of empowerment. When The New York Times asked people why they share, 69 per cent said it let them feel more involved in the world. For 84 per cent, sharing was a way to support causes or issues they cared about. Sharing online is a far cry from writing a letter to the editor which used to be the main way to get a viewpoint out to a mass audience. Regardless of the size of the audience, people value the ability to have a voice and spread their message online. Being able to show you care about an issue or cause is a powerful driver for sharing, as the spread of the Kony 2012 video demonstrated in March of that year. The thirty-minute film aimed to raise awareness of and support for the arrest of war criminal Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.
The video, made by the U.S.–based advocacy group Invisible Children, quickly became an Internet phenomenon. Within four days of its release, it attracted more than fifty million views online and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to the group. Its critics said it oversimplified the situation in central Africa for Western audiences. But its simple message was one of the reasons it was highly contagious. Sending the video to friends was a symbolic action that signalled a political preference. Kony 2012 illustrates how the political has insinuated itself into everyday social interactions. Messages about the video will have jostled their way alongside remarks about food, fashion or the famous. The millions who spread the link to Kony 2012 were hoping to sway others and be part of something bigger.
There is one major imperative that emerges from the research on why people take the time to tell others about something interesting they’ve come across. And it comes back to the notion of social capital. The exchange of information and knowledge is a way of increasing our value within our social relationships and networks. It might be by appearing to be “in the know,” or because we want to give back to our community. The study by The New York Times underlined that people share to bring valuable and entertaining material to others. Asked why she was an avid sharer, one woman said it was “to enrich the lives of those around me.” Telling others about what we know provides a sense of self-fulfillment. “I enjoy getting comments that I sent great information and that my friends will forward it to their friends because it’s so helpful,” said another of the women interviewed for the study.
It’s not just people in the big cities of New York, Chicago and San Francisco, like those who featured in The New York Times study, who feel this way. The Capital Times newspaper has provided news, information and diversion for the people of the Midwestern city of Madison, Wisconsin, and its surrounding counties for almost a century. Faced with declining circulation, it was one of the first newspapers to abandon daily publication in 2008. Instead, it shifted its focus to the web, while still producing a twice-weekly, magazine-style print edition. University of Madison-Wisconsin researcher Sue Robinson watched the change unfold. As part of her study on the painful transformation from print to digital, she interviewed and surveyed one hundred Madison residents.
For these residents, concerned about what was happening in their city, commenting on a news story or sending it on to others was their civic duty. “It is more or less that we all have an obligation to leave the planet a little better than I found it, that there is a social responsibility that we have as humans,” said one blogger in the study. Others talked about drawing on their expertise to “fix” incorrect information or challenge points of view, sharing their social, cultural or professional capital. For Robinson, “these citizens noted a transactional value for themselves—the satisfaction of ‘knowing’ and then contributing to the process of informing the citizenry.” The Madison residents got a good feeling from knowing they had done good, boosting their social capital in the community. The same result came out of The New York Times study, where nine out of ten people said they carefully considered how the information they share would be useful to others.
The reason people are drawn to passing on information that others will value seems to lie in an area on the outer surface of the brain. Pioneering research by UCLA psychologists identified how the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) in the brain lights up when people find something interesting, helpful or amusing to pass on. “We wanted to explore what differentiates ideas that bomb from ideas that go viral,” said lead author Emily Falk, who conducted the research as a UCLA doctoral student and went on to join the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.
For the experiment, the UCLA scientists asked students to decide what to share with others and mapped their brain activity using MRI. The students, who were either production interns or producers, had to choose which TV pilots to pitch or back. The results showed surprising action in the TPJ, a part of the brain involved in considering what other people think and feel. The scans revealed far more activity in the TPJ region in interns who were particularly good at persuading the producers. What they didn’t find was similar activity in the parts of the brain associated with reasoning. “You might expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated about ideas that they themselves are excited about, but our research suggests that’s not the whole story. Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important,” said Falk. “As I’m looking at an idea, I might be thinking about what other people are likely to value, and that might make me a better idea salesperson later.”
The research suggests that when we see a piece of information, the brain is already reacting to the stimuli, processing the data and assessing its interest to others. It seems our brains are hardwired to filter what will be important, fascinating or amusing to others. The UCLA research provides clues into what sociologists have known for decades: how and why some individuals take on the role of information brokers and bask in the glow of being the source in the know. Virtually all the people taking part in The New York Times study into digital sharing said they reflected on the value of what they pass on. The survey found that 94 per cent said they carefully considered how the information they shared would be useful to others. Without noticing, our brain is helping us assess the social currency to be gained from sharing information.
Understanding the how and why of sharing is vital for news outlets such as The New York Times that trade in the currency of ideas. Today, the media encourages us to share, like or recommend a story on our myriad digital devices, tapping into an innate desire to be appreciated by others. Throughout history, people have used the communication tools and spaces available at the time to connect with others to sort, filter and manage information; form and nurture relationships; and signal what we care about.
The academies of scholars in sixteenth-century Italy were the Facebook of the day, commenting on and discussing the news in letters, speeches and yearbooks. In Stuart England in the 1600s, the place to share the news was the coffeehouse. In the early days of the republic in China, at the turn of the twentieth century, it was the teahouse. Eighteenth-century Parisians, poorly served by official channels at a time of revolutionary upheaval, turned to exclusive salons and public parks to learn of the news.
In the salon of Madame Marie Anne Doublet, a select group of eighteenth-century Parisians would meet once a week to tell each other about the latest political machinations, fancies or follies coming from the court at Versailles. Madame Doublet’s salon was more than a place for the exchange of salacious gossip. In the lounge were two journals prepared by one of her servants, who had gone around the neighbourhood and asked, “What’s new?” One journal contained information that was considered to be truthful, while the other was made up of news of questionable origin.
Every Saturday, leading figures from the arts and sciences would come to the salon, read the journals, compare them with what they had heard, and add their own snippets. They realized that each of them might have heard only fragments of a story. By pooling their information, these Parisians would try to create as complete and accurate an account as they could. Once they had collectively vetted the material, the newsletters would be copied and sent to select friends. Some enterprising friends copied the reports by hand and sold copies to readers in the countryside. The newsletters told tales of prominent deaths and marriages, but also of military escapades and the tempestuous exchanges between king and parliament.
Madame Doublet’s was one of the most prominent salons at the time, frequented by ambassadors, historians, mathematicians and poets. They were the bloggers of their time, commenting on each other’s work over a glass of wine. The salon was the newsroom, where intellectuals discussed and shared news that the government press dared not print. The king ruled as an absolute monarch, and the officially sanctioned journals offered little more than court pronouncements. Yet it was a turbulent time in France, marked by expensive military adventures abroad, tensions over political reform and an extravagant court. Behind the splendour and glitter of eighteenth-century Versailles, the seeds were laid for the French Revolution, which would result in the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792 and the beheading of Louis XVI a year later.
The common people were not supposed to know about affairs of state at the royal court. Politics were “le secret du roi.” However, the emerging Parisian bourgeoisie of merchants, shopkeepers and tradesmen wanted to be in the know about decisions that would affect their businesses and families. Among the places they would go to share and hear tales of bed-hopping or lavish parties by the royals was the Tree of Cracow. Facts and fiction flowed freely under the branches of this large, leafy chestnut tree in the gardens of the Palais-Royal in the heart of Paris. This shady spot was just one of the numerous parks, squares and boulevards where the common people gathered to hear from those who claimed to be in the know about what was happening in the corridors of power. The Tree of Cracow was the Twitter of its day, where news was contested, confirmed or contradicted. A Parisian turning up in the park would ask, “What’s happening?” just as Twitter once used to prompt its users.
During this volatile time in French history, news was first spread by word of mouth. Sometimes, the news came out in the shape of a song or fable. Reports about the monarch’s foibles, wasteful spending or infidelity were discussed and cross-checked with others. Some of the information was written down and sent to others. The palace took such talk seriously enough to spy on its own people, as the chatter undermined respect for the monarchy. Madame Doublet herself felt the ire of Louis XV in 1753, when he threatened to confine her to a convent unless she stopped spreading her “impertinent” news. In the words of historian Robert Darnton, “the media knit themselves together in a communication system so powerful that it proved to be decisive in the collapse of the regime.”
Three centuries later, Facebook has become the salon where friends get together to catch up, compare notes and share the news. Twitter has taken the place of the Tree of Cracow. Every society comes up with a way to hunt for and gather information and then pass on what it has found. The way information is collected, cross-checked and circulated has changed since eighteenth-century France. The dynamics, though, have remained constant. Three centuries later, the people of Madison in Wisconsin are telling their community about an interesting or amusing news tidbit for the same reasons. They want to enhance their social capital by showing they are in the know. They want to express themselves and signal what is important to them. They want to enrich the lives of others by giving back to the community. News and information is a currency that shapes what we decide to share with our social circles.