I want to share with you an idea.
Sharing stories in social media can multiply your connections,
but, sometimes, sharing can also divide us.
On June 16th, in 2016,
I was in Spain, at a conference, sitting in an auditorium,
listening to a speaker, a little bit like you’re doing here today,
and, like many other people at that talk, I was tweeting about it.
Sorry, I was multitasking.
(Laughter)
And, as I opened up my laptop and I logged on to my Twitter account,
a new story caught my eye.
You might remember this:
The British member of Parliament, Jo Cox, had been attacked.
It was a really brutal, senseless attack on a woman about my age,
she was just going about her work.
I carried on listening to the speaker,
but I kept my Twitter feed open in front of me too.
Partly, that was so I could tweet about the talk,
but, partly, that was so I could follow the unfolding events back in the UK too.
By the time the speaker had finished their presentation,
the news had broken on Twitter that Jo Cox had died.
I sat with a colleague next to me.
We were just looking at our Twitter feeds, stunned.
And responses to this news began to pour out on social media.
Politicians from all the parties, from both sides of the referendum debate,
posted their condolences online.
People who knew Jo Cox, people who didn’t know Jo Cox responded.
Some of them posted other online content too.
For example, they linked to copies of her parliamentary maiden speech.
Other people retweeted her last post.
On what would have been her birthday, a week later,
people used the hashtag #LoveLikeJo as a call to action,
posting photographs like this one, of people coming together.
Perhaps you remember hearing that news.
Perhaps you might even have tweeted some of these posts.
I wanted to share that story with you,
because it shows us just how powerful stories can be.
We’ve heard lots of stories today.
The reason we tell them is because they help us make a connection.
Jo Cox’s story was tragic.
It’s really hard, I find it really hard, even to tell that story
and not be moved by it.
We tell them because they make a connection,
hopefully, between me and you, right now.
But what that story in particular tells us
is that, when we tell stories in social media,
the share button can make storytelling really powerful,
and that’s because sharing has three meanings
that I want to tell you about now.
The first of them is that “sharing” is another word for “telling.”
When I tell you a story, I share that story with you,
just like I’ve done this afternoon.
I’ve told you about hearing the news of Jo Cox’s death.
There’s a second meaning of sharing
that we use to refer to when we create common ground between people.
So, we use this to perhaps refer to having a shared hobby,
like keeping fit.
It might be a shared belief, it might even be a shared experience.
Now, hopefully, you felt a little bit of that this afternoon too.
Perhaps when I told you about hearing the news of Jo Cox’s death,
you might have remembered that very event,
or maybe it made you think of another news report,
maybe that did something similar.
Things like the Orlando massacre,
or the recent terrorist attack in Westminster,
are similar kinds of events.
But, when we turn to social media,
there’s a third really important meaning of “sharing.”
It refers to an action we take when we click on the share button.
Has anybody ever done that? Retweeted a post? Shared content online?
Give me a wave, if you have.
Okay, so you know what I’m talking about,
and you know that, when you click that share button,
what happens is you reproduce content.
You take it from one place,
and you reproduce it in another part of the social media network.
Now, these three meanings of “sharing”,
they were described by the media scholar Nicholas John
in a paper he published in 2013.
What I’ve been doing in my own work
is to look at what that share button does to storytelling,
how it changes the kind of stories that we tell,
how it changes the kinds of effects that storytelling can have.
Sharing has a multiplication effect on storytelling.
That happens in several ways.
First, it multiplies the story itself.
When you click on the share button, you create another copy of that story.
So, we have the original, and we have the copy that you’ve shared.
But lots of people don’t just click on that share button.
They add some content to it as well.
So, the share button actually helps that story to grow.
So, this is an example that shows you that.
We’ve got the original post, which is from the Open Britain Press,
and we’ve got an additional comment that someone else on Twitter has added to it,
telling us that this was the last piece that Jo Cox retweeted.
Now, this is important because making the story grow, multiplying the story,
increases its visibility.
First, it helps you to show that story to your own social media audience.
And, secondly, some social media sites have algorithms built into them
that multiply that effect further still.
You might have come across that
when you’ve seen content posted to the top of the timeline.
Anybody here use Facebook?
Okay, some of you will confess to that.
You might be very familiar with that effect.
If someone shares a post on Facebook,
it encourages other people to interact with it.
It promotes that story.
This leads us to a second multiplication effect:
that sharing multiplies the number of people who tell the stories.
So, when I told you the story about hearing the news of Jo Cox’s death,
that’s just one storyteller, me, telling that story to you.
But, in social media, when we use the share button,
we’ve got at least two storytellers.
There’s the person who’s told the original story,
and there’s the person who’s clicked the share button.
This is important because, although sharing opens up the possibility
for lots of us to get involved –
you’ve all used the share button –
actually, there are differences in the types of tellers.
So, there’s the person who creates the story,
who shares, who tells the story,
and there’s the person who clicks the share button
and reproduces that story.
And you can’t do the second one without the first, right?
So, you might think that the person who’s creating the story
is the more powerful one.
That makes us question: whose story is it that we’re sharing,
and whose interests are we serving when we share that story?
Let’s look at an example now
where we can see just how effective that multiplication effect is
for certain storytellers.
Now, I too have a guilty pleasure.
My guilty pleasure is X Factor.
I know. Don’t hate me.
(Laughter)
So, I actually looked at the patterns of sharing
in a data set of over a million tweets
that were posted in response to the international franchise, The X Factor,
and I was really interested in trying to tease out
who was doing these different kinds of sharing.
The patterns were really clear.
So, the stories that got shared the most often
were from Twitter accounts that had really large follower lists.
So, typically, these were celebrities, they were performers on the show,
they were the judges.
Sometimes, you’ve also got parody accounts too.
The kinds of stories that they told also, well, they reflected these tellers.
So, we had celebrities
giving us behind-the-scenes glimpses into the series.
For example, that they were just off to rehearse.
Or, “Here’s a photograph of me in my trailer
before I’m about to go on the stage.”
Now, the parody accounts were doing something quite different.
They were telling really funny stories.
I wanted to show you one, but they’re really quite rude.
So, I couldn’t.
And I haven’t got that much of a sense of humor.
So, right now, you’re going to have to imagine one of those stories.
Those stories, whether they were funny stories
or whether they were celebrity stories,
for every one storyteller creating the content
there were ten pressing the share button.
And, for the most part, those very many tellers clicking the share button
were fans, they were members of the audience,
doing really important work for those celebrities in those parodies,
because they were creating visibility for them within the network of Twitter.
But what they were also doing was they were creating connections,
they were creating whole connections around each of those stories,
and those connections were based on a principle
that sharing also multiplies similarity,
because those networks were primarily based on taste.
You could see all kinds of evidence for this.
So, for example, they might use hashtags
that they’ve reflected being part of the same fan group.
A really good example of this that you see a lot in that data
is the hashtag for “Directioners.”
No prizes for guessing who they’re fans of.
It’s the former boy band, One Direction.
But people also did some quite curious things with those hashtags.
For example, they would use a hashtag for “town”
to show that they were from the same place as the performer.
Or they’d even use a hashtag to show they were watching
at the same time as someone else.
The way these tellers interacted with each other when they added content
also shows us how this principle of similarity was being driven
through the sharing process.
So, perhaps you’ve done this when you’ve added a bit of content as well
to something you’ve retweeted.
In this case, they were adding compliments,
for example, telling the celebrity how fabulous they were,
or sharing a joke, laughing with them.
But not always.
Now, I told you I haven’t got much of a sense of humor.
So, sometimes, I’ve been in this scenario
where everybody else has been laughing at a joke,
and I haven’t quite got it.
I told you.
I need to go to a kind of humor therapy perhaps.
But we saw exactly that kind of dynamic in these tweets too,
and the people who weren’t laughing,
immediately they became the butt of the joke too.
Immediately, they were positioned as an out-group,
not a member of the knowing in-group
who really understood what X Factor was all about.
This picture is perhaps not terribly surprising.
It’s one that you might recognize from other contexts too.
It’s not just The X Factor that capitalizes on this principle
that a shared interest can multiply the connections
between one storyteller and another.
We can see this when companies promote their products.
We can see it when politicians try and gasp to engage with their campaigns.
I’ve even done it as an academic,
trying to share the results of my work with other people too.
Maybe you’ve done it as well.
We can also see it embedded in some of the slogans
that we see in social media as well,
like this one that tells us that sharing is loving.
Well, if sharing is loving,
does it mean that we always like the same thing?
Slogans like this are a little bit vague too,
because sharing is loving what?
Sharing is loving whom?
Is it the case that we really all love the same thing?
Is it the case that we really all love each other?
Well, clearly not,
because it’s quite clear that the stories that are shared,
the stories that are reproduced in social media,
do not always bring people together, or certainly not everyone.
So, we end up with this really puzzling question,
it’s like a maths question: can sharing actually divide us?
I want to show you how this can happen.
Say I wrote a story about a controversial politician,
and then I decided I wanted to publish that story online.
I could put it somewhere, like a Facebook public page perhaps,
and I could invite you to give your opinion by using the share button.
I could say, “Share if you don’t agree.
Like if you do.”
So, it becomes a polling option.
You might end up with a result that looks a little bit like this one:
283 shares, 1,700 likes.
Now, this might seem really bizarre, but this is a genuine result,
and it’s one that’s taken from a Facebook memorial page
that was set up to mark the death
of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher,
and where the anonymous page owner was using the share button
to actually create divided groups
between those who supported Thatcher and those who did not.
This can happen because clicking that share button creates metadata,
and that metadata can be counted, it turns sharing into a number.
Think about it: when you look at that total, you see a number;
you don’t see the names of the people who clicked the share button.
It hides those people. It also dilutes the meaning of sharing.
Sharing and liking, in a context like that,
might as well just be labeled “A and B,” or “black and red.”
You’re just clicking on one option rather than another.
But, even though it takes away the meaning of the actual word itself,
it still keeps the technological function of the share button.
It still makes that story more visible.
So, even the opponents of Margaret Thatcher
ended up with a story about Margaret Thatcher
being published on their timeline.
Does all of this mean that we should stop sharing?
My answer is no!
I believe that we should reclaim sharing in social media.
We need to care about what we share. I know that’s cheesy, but it’s true.
We need to put stories back into sharing
because stories remind us that it’s people who are at the heart of sharing,
and not just the share button.
Both sharing and stories enable us to make connections,
and we need to forge those connections now at this time more than ever before.
We need to understand
what the multiplication effect of sharing actually does.
We need to understand how that can divide us into opposing groups,
because if I only ever share stories that I like or that I agree with,
it creates the effect like me being inside a bubble.
And, if I stay inside my buble of connections
and you stay inside your bubble of connections,
then it would be all too easy for me to think that everybody was just like me,
with the same tastes, the same beliefs, the same worldview.
I don’t learn to listen to the stories
that somebody else is telling from another perspective,
or another worldview.
What sharing stories can help us do is not inflate those bubbles.
It can help us to build bridges.
How do we do this? Three ways.
First, the next time you want to click on a share button, stop and think.
What are you doing? Are you just sharing something you agree with?
Are you inflating a bubble, or are you building a bridge?
Second, seek out a story
from someone whose perspective is different to your own.
Even if you choose to end up agreeing to disagree,
it is so much better to build a bridge and to listen
than never listen at all.
And third, when you’re listening, listen for those parts of commonality,
don’t just focus on difference.
Perhaps then, we might find the same thing that Jo Cox observed in her maiden speech,
that we have far more in common than the things that divide us.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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