Share and Share alike

I agree, and my favorite explanation for why came from Matt Gallivan, a senior research analyst for NPR, who said “Sharing is not ‘the new black,’ it is the new normal. There are too many benefits to living with a certain degree of openness for Digital Natives to ‘grow out of it.’ Job opportunities, new personal connections, professional collaboration, learning from others’ experiences, etc., are all very powerful benefits to engaging openly with others online, and this is something that Gen Y understands intuitively.”
How Milliennials’ sharing Habits can Benefit Organizations

I live in a world of sharing. This post, originating in my head, will spread from this site to my twitter feed, my Facebook page to my friends in a blink of an eye. Should they find the material interesting, they will share it their friends ad infinitum. The odds of this post reaching more than a few degrees from me are slim – there will be nothing incendiary or provocative about this post – yet it will travel beyond my normal sharing capabilities without me even trying. That is the world I live in. That is the defining difference of my generation.

Since 1997, I’ve shared the later stages of my adolescence, my college years, my early adult years all the way to present day. I’ve documented my love life, struggles and triumphs in my career, sought help and offered advice. I’m not in the minority either – early sites like LiveJournal to the powerhouse sites like Facebook have captured the memoirs of an entire generation. I think it’s because of this fact that we haven’t had the defining novel of our generation. There isn’t a Sun Also Rises or an On the Road that captures what our generation has endured. Instead, there is just this – the internet. A sharing culture that, ultimately reveals who we are as people.