(Pasadena, CA) Last week at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, iOS 6 was revealed with a host of new features that will make iPhone use more efficient and powerful.  One of the most often cited features of the keynote presentation was the integrated sharing features of the new operating system that will allow everyone to upload content to all their favorite social networking sites and share it with their friends and followers.  Sharing was one of the most frequently cited features during the presentation and as I quickly began to imagine how I would be using those new features when they become available in a few weeks time, I found myself fixating on that word, “share” and just how differently we have come to use it in the last decade.

It is most popularly encountered these days at the bottom of a webpage or in notifications received multiple times a day, that someone in your network has shared with you where they are having lunch, how their day is going or a picture of how great their seats are at a hockey or baseball game.

But sharing has historically carried a connotation of sacrifice, offering a piece of what’s yours that results in you having a little less, but someone else getting something they didn’t have at all.   The youngest of children understand this and easily fall into line, breaking a Twizzler in halves, splitting time with a toy so a friend can play with it too, or moving the DVD player to the center of the back seat so a little sister can see it better.   Each of these contains, built into it, an idea of sacrifice, of giving something up to provide someone else an opportunity.

But sharing online is different.  To share an article online, I don’t have to give it away or walk to the copier and figure out how to condense the large broadsheet into a copier-sized page.  I don’t have to walk to the drug store and pay for a reprint of a photo or give away the one in my wallet.  I don’t have to hand over a book knowing that it may very well become a permanent addition to someone else’s library.  Sharing online has become much less about sacrificing and exercising courtesy, but instead about showing – or showing off.   Now, if someone wants to post pictures of their seats at the Laker game to show their privilege and prestige, that’s their business.  But it signals a clear shift in how we view the act of sharing, from something that was once a sacrifice for the benefit of someone else, to something that now benefits the person “sharing” through an act of self-promotion.

Even beyond Facebook, this seems to be the rule.  The website Reddit, which is a thriving community of humor, banter and political debate, operates on a voting system which dictates how visible a post becomes.  Redditors jockey and strategize to accumulate points, their running total being colloquially referred to as “karma.”  This has given birth to a lexicon of terminology such as “karma-whoring” which often entails posting a picture for cheap laughs simply to ratchet-up one’s karma.   Posting to Reddit is easy too – it’s one of the  “share” options at the bottom of thousands of popular webpages.

My training as an English teacher forced me to see this new usage as a correlation to a much larger sociological phenomenon that is both visible in political rhetoric and felt in our schools and communities.  One doesn’t have to look far to see the manifestations of this linguistic shift in daily life.  Just a decade ago, calling for cuts across the board to public services would have drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle.  But today there is little shame in holding a view that says firemen, police and teachers are all overpaid.  Election season always brings a chorus of anti-tax rhetoric – but this has now been going on for several years at progressively increasing volume.

Such unwillingness to share the costs of a healthy functioning society has manifest in massive cuts to K-12 education, which is further defunded with each new budget.  Even state universities, which were formerly a widely accepted cost of securing the public trust, have now subsidized by raising fees, making a college education too expensive for children from average working families.

The rhetoric coming from proponents of small government indicates that it’s only getting more severe.  In the community where my 1800 students live, there is scant money for libraries that have dramatically reduced their hours and closed branches making internet and computers inaccessible to poor children, as well as a safe, quiet place to study for kids who share one bedroom apartments with large families.   Less time and maintenance is being put into local parks and fields, making sports and athletics difficult for people who don’t live in wealthy communities with well-funded park-districts or have access to private facilities.  Improving public transportation continues to face vehement opposition and even state parks in California have had to contemplate closure.  People in Wisconsin and Illinois, unwilling to sacrifice in taxes what they feel is rightfully theirs, continue to push back against firemen, police and teacher’s unions.

This point is made rather elegantly by Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School, who has been a fierce defender of the public good.  In an impassioned speech that you can view on you tube (and share with your friends) she says:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.  You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear.  You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.  You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.  You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God Bless! Keep a Big Hunk of it.  But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

It is hard to know whether the new conception of sharing is causing a shift in behavioral norms or, if it is a product itself of changing times.  But one look at Silicon Valley would seem to indicate that sharing has never been stronger.  But that’s just when things become popular – when they are easy and don’t cost anything.