I Don't Share.

That's not true at all anymore, especially if you consider what has happened over the last 5 to 10 years with the Internet and the amount of content shared every minute. In fact we have become such a sharing world, it's a wonder there is anything left to share. Before the web it was books, newspapers along with pens and paper and long telephone conversations that shared information, stories and gossip with people we either knew, or wanted to know. It was a way for culture and history to be passed on

A New York Times study tried to make sense of why people shared and what motivated them to open up and to share information and content with strangers. The study ended up splitting the sharers into 6 online engagers being, altruists, careerists, hipsters, boomerangs, connecters and selectives. All of them shared for different reasons and used different channels but mostly it was for recognition of some kind.

No doubt you fit into one or more of the above as you share for entertainment, causes, selling, relationships and finding ways for self fulfillment. From the helpful altruist, the Linked In careerist, the Twittering hipster, the Facebooking boomerang, the creative connector saving you money and the selective knowing that whatever you post is there forever, they all look to share.

The one thing they all have in common is they all want to be "on shared". For everyone gets a kick out of having their thoughts, opinions and findings validated by someone sharing them with someone else, who with any luck will share it with someone else. This is the way stories used to carry through cultures by way of the troubadour, the story teller and the village elder. Nowadays everyone has the opportunity to be the village elder, especially if they are part of an online tribe.

Those village tribes are now global and have names like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Facebook villagers create a million photos a minute and share updates and wall posts enough to fill all the libraries in the world. The Twitter village shares 125,000 tweets a minute with most of it falling into the inane and useless gossip about people caught with their pants down but has replaced the tom toms whenever quick news is required. The most creative of villages is the You Tube village, which has just announced its villagers upload 48 hours of video every minute. To give you an idea of how much they are sharing, if you watched nothing but You Tube your entire life, you would get through about 10 days worth of uploads.

So sharing has taken on monumental numbers and doesn't look like slowing down any time soon but villagers are challenged by the sheer volume of information and content and this could lead to some forming smaller tribes. Smaller tribes for greater recognition, smaller tribes for less information over load and smaller tribes because we want to know each other. We may laugh and pick on larger tribes but our tribe needs to be "where everybody knows your name" because whenever you share, the highest recognition is always from your peers, colleagues and friends, not from the unknowns of the other tribes.