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User-generated content dominates contemporary online services. Today, users can produce and share a large variety of digital content online, often in the form of status updates on social networks, pictures, audiovisual content, and text messages. Understanding user motivations to share this information has long been the focus of research on human–computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). Understanding the underlying user motivations to share and consume content is essential for both service designers and researchers in the fields of HCI and CSCW. It guides decisions on the features that content-sharing services should incorporate.
The range of novel online services and connected devices has dramatically expanded the content and objects to share. Shared content and objects range from new types of digital content, such as music preferences and workout data, to sharing, renting, and loaning physical things, including household items, cars, or even apartments. Sharing economy services enable users to share their possessions and resources. In the sharing economy, the digital artifact that enables the sharing can be an advertisement for the resource (e.g., on a network hospitality platform) and is an act of communication, while an actual sharing activity often happens through physical interaction and is an act of distribution (John, 2013). Whereas a plethora of research has focused on the motivations of sharing on online social networking platforms, such as Facebook—especially on sharing photos—the sharing economy and other non-media sharing services have been studied less. This work extensively investigates and compares motivations to share different non-media types of content. With this work, the focus shifts towards understanding the recurrent motivating factors with various types of content.
Non-media types of content share similarities with traditional media content, such as photos, video, and audio. Non-media content can be derived or aggregated from standard content types, for example, travel data, which is often a collection of pictures and other metadata. Another example of non-media content is exercise data, which may include privacy-sensitive information. Moreover, the sharing enabled by sharing economy services is a fundamentally different phenomenon. These new phenomena require an extension of existing knowledge of the motivations and reasons that drive the sharing of personal physical possessions and resources. The design of this study involves unveiling the differences and similarities that motivate the sharing of non-media types of content. Furthermore, this work approaches the different types of content as diverse categories of items to share, whereas most earlier work has considered digital content as one entity (John, 2012; John, 2013).
The study focuses on six non-media types of content: (1) music preferences and playlists, (2) travel plans and trip details, (3) details of physical exercise and sports activity, (4) personal physical possessions such as apartments and vehicles (“sharing economy”), (5) virtual possessions in video games and virtual social worlds and (6) personal culinary and dietary preferences. Despite the wide variety of objects to share within the six typologies we selected, they all construct social relations (John, 2012) and provoke social intensification (Kennedy, 2016), which is manifested in communicative and distributed acts of sharing (John, 2013).
This paper focuses on two specific research questions: