Sharism

The less you share, the less power you have. And the more you share, the more possible it is for you get social support.

- Isaac Mao [1]

Description

Isaac Mao:

"Sharism(分享主义 in Chinese) is about sharing, for sure. It means a tendency of sharing your works(everything) to be used by your social network(or public domain), but still keep your right and property based on your consensus. It's really not strange concept especiall after blogging and web 2.0 stuffsemerged for years. As well those new copyright movements, like Creative Commons. You can practise sharism anytime by communicating with others, writing blogs, posting photos, or organizing an offline meetup to generate some group discussions, etc. And step by step, you can feel the change course that you are becoming more open-minded.

An avoidable question raised along sharism. What's the incentive to people if they would like to share? The answer if very simple. You share one piece, you can get times of return. The current social norm may always suggest people that be careful of sharing, otherwise you will lose control of your own stuff, or maybe very dangrous to love prvicy? Is it true? Let me use a metaphor to tell you that actually sharing is in a new space that won't hurt your privcy, instead it shows new possibilities and upside to everyone.' (http://www.isaacmao.com/meta/2007/09/sharism-is-not-communism-nor-socialism.html)

Discussion

Stefan Merten:

"On the one hand you see individual sharing which I could imagine means that people produce something on an individual basis and then share it. I guess this type of sharing is the basis of Flickr, YouTube and the like.

What comes to my mind is this: The producers of those goods are as isolated as the typical capitalist producer. There main difference is that they do not produce because of the money but for other reasons.

I may not know the dynamics of such sharing communities - BTW: are they really communities at all? - well enough but to me it looks more like self-realization (ending up in the individual) than Selbstentfaltung (ending up in society). The act of sharing in these communities is just an add-on to an otherwise very individualist pattern. I publish my photos on Flickr because I need a place to show them to some friends.

Only remixing this content would make it a societal thing then - but that's probably not what most people aim to. That would at least explain to me why this type of things feels so different to me. IMHO an interesting thought..

On the other hand you see common production which we can see in Free Software and other communities like Wikipedia or OpenAccess whose aim it is to produce a good. Usually (always?) a good which is useful for more people than the producer group. Here Selbstentfaltung is at work where the effort taken is directly directed to that "super-individual", that societal product."