Born to share…?

“Sharing is a fundamental consumer behavior that we have either tended to overlook or to confuse with commodity exchange and gift giving. Sharing is a distinct, ancient, and increasingly vital consumer research topic that bears on a broad array of consumption issues ranging from sharing household resources versus atomized family possessions to file sharing versus intellectual property rights.” This quote from Russell Belk’s essay on Sharing emulates his stand on how as a society we know so little of what we have always done. Something that is second nature for most is one of the worst things for us as people. Belk first begins by explaining the difference between sharing in and sharing out and tells how sharing in dissolves boundaries between people. The paper goes on to describe how sharing is the most basic form of economic distribution for several years. Even in our society several things are based upon the principles of sharing down to our food and drinks. Our entire lives we have been living on the subliminal idea to share. Even the excepted norms of society have to do with the idea of sharing. As people as one society ourselves as human beings without sharing we could not sustain our own very existence. We as a people need to share in order to continue or existence in a positive manner, sharing knowledge, recourses and our ideas so that forward growth is possible.