Sharing

Sharing in terms of social media, is sending or receiving links to digital media by another user. Most social networking sites allow shared content to be view by all your friends at once. Media can also be shared from one single person to another. By sharing on social media, a user’s profile becomes more aligned with there identity. If a user gives to much information about their personal life, this can be considered oversharing. This could lead to very personal information getting seen by thousands of people. People will share as much as possible to gain sympathy, likes, or to brag to others. Sharing can also be used to create a false identity of one’s self. Since users can share whatever they want, they could lie to change how other users perceive them.

What are We Sharing?
Everything that is uploaded to the internet can be shared with another user. Some of the most common things that are shared are videos, photos, and news articles. Something that has been made easier by social networking is sharing photos from your own life with friends and family. not only are we sharing media created by other people and big companies, we are also sharing media from our own lifes. Because of how much we share, anyone can go to someone's social media profile and learn exactly what that person is like in the real world. Users can find out if another user is married, happy, has kids, where they work, and even what high school they went to. All of this information can be found out without even meeting the person.

Downside to Sharing
Other people aren't the only thing that sees what you post online. Everything that a user posts to social media can be read by a machine and used to change what you see online. Big companies use techniques such as data mining and data warehousing to gathering information about your interests and search history. Companies use this information to find products that you might be interested in buying. Some websites warehouse this data and then sell the information to other companies for profit. Some users say that these business practices are immoral and are a breach of the users privacy.