Is it Worth Sharing?

Sharing has become a huge part of social media, in fact that is what social media can be defined as. Sharing peoples ideas and information has become apart of everyday life and can be accessed through our smart phones at all times throughout a day. Just because there is a ton of media at our finger tips doesn't mean that its worthy of being shared. How does one know what is sharable and what isn't.

Humor is a huge part of why people share in social media. Not just any humor though, the humor has to be a trending in what is funny in social medias. "Recognizing a joke involves exchanging judgments about the world and defining oneself either with or against others", says Mary Douglas. "Humor is not simply a matter of taste: it is a vehicle by which people articulate and validate their relationships with those whom they share the joke", she adds. This is a common tradition of why people share things, the humoristic side emphasizes those relationships with humor. If someone is able to identify something important or not important through a joke, it is more easily able to catch someone's attention.

Memes are always evolving to form with whatever events are trending and can be transform any sort of social issue into a joke.

 

In this meme it brings together the community that is anti-Donald Trump and connects them with an Orange is the New Black message. Not only is this meme going to appeal to those that are anti Trump but it also will be sharable for those who favor OITNB. If something has a greater message it is more likely to be shared especially through humor because everyone is willing to listen or see humoristic things. This clearly has a defined message but by adding in OITNB it serves as a gap as is shared in chapter 5 of Spreadable Media. 

The second thing that I think really promotes something to be sharable is its importance. However, this idea of importance must also be intertwined with my followers for it to be sharable. This not only makes the sharer feel more knowledgeable, in the case of being the first one to hear about it but it also helps get interactions and connections from your followers.

In this case I would share this sort of thing with my followers. Not only does it affect me but the people that follow me. It will promote some kind of interaction with the people that I am friends with on social media. This is going to save the city more money and it could end up helping us TLU students in the long run. Like maybe they can fix the on campus roads with this extra money. In this case it would be important to all my fellow students and peers that I follow. It would also create a sort of boundary for helping them out and sharing something that is relevant to them.

If the message isn't relative to most of the followers a lot of people will share directly. It is still functioning as the same purpose, just not to a mass amount of people. Inside jokes are a common one, or relatable things between you and a small number of people. It also can depend on what kind of social media platform that you are sharing on. This has a lot to do with different audiences and how they will respond different on something like Facebook vs. Twitter. These are two different levels of how something and why something should be shared.

Thirdly I believe that some things will always be sharable and those types of things function under what Lotz suggests in chapter 5:
-available when audiences want it
-portable
-easily reusable
-relevant to multiple audiences
-part of a stream
In these cases something is always going to be shared for at least one of these reasons. It doesn't necessarily matter what the topic is, but it will always matter on one of Lotz's stipulations. Sharing is easy and actually quite simple but for the individual reasons of why certain things are shared and why certain things are not is a complicated concept.

The fourth thing that posts must include to be sharable is something relevant to a particular audience that is on the social media channel you are interacting on. In this case it would be important for you to share something about Texas Lutheran University if you attend the university and have followers that are also in your community of TLU. This will make it more likeable and sharable because it is relevant to those around you. However, if you were to share something about TLU to a community of people who aren't in college the share ability of that post has decreased significantly, not because the post isn't good but its just not relevant to that particular audience.

Lastly a post is more likely to be shared if it can irritate or up-rise a particular audience by standing out. This can relate to some of the political posts that are all over Facebook and these posts are high profile for people to comment and share their opinion on them. This has to do with the connections of people to what they believe their timelines to be full of. If a person sees something on their timeline that isn't in their beliefs they are more likely to share content on it because it stands out. Standing out doesn't always have to be with political views, it can also be done with photographs and stories.

Humans like to be entertained but its sometimes one of the hardest things to do is to get someone to pay attention, this is why the post must stand out like a sore thumb to the audience. This is how news posts get shared at such a high rate, they have an aspect that stands out, usually by a terrifying headline. As economist Richard Caves explains that uncertainty principle is not knowing what our audience really wants, but its important to make content available in forms that the audience will find useful. There will never be an answer for what makes our audience more likely to share something but there are tactics we can use to make the odds high for sharing content.