The Gift of News: Phatic News Sharing on Social Media for Social Cohesion

Abstract

Growing interest with the practice of sharing news stories through social media has driven a move in scholarship away from the “news” aspect and towards the “sharing” aspect. As more news is distributed using social media, its use as social glue becomes increasingly significant. Accordingly, this paper places news sharing in the sociological tradition of gift-giving studies, viewing it as a manifestation of care, above and beyond the informational utility of a shared news item. This paper uses data from focus groups of 88 people who routinely share news on social media, and a survey of 2,000 news sharers. The intention is to complement existing studies of the sociality of news sharing by offering an account of the interplay between the who, why and what of news sharing which places it in the relational realm of gifts given and received as a mechanism to demonstrate care and contribute to social cohesion. It proposes the concept of phatic news sharing to account for this emerging use.

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