“Shared Online, Made People Envious, Felt Good”

Abstract

An online survey of 200 participants was conducted on the experiences of sharing material and immaterial artifacts, focusing on interaction with non-media content types. The survey included six categories of sharing: music preferences, travel plans, sports activities, apartments and vehicles, virtual items in online games, and dietary preferences. The study identified factors that motivate participation in content-mediated interaction: discovery, curating self, connectedness, collaboration, enjoyment, and instrumental motivations, as a set of six motivating factors driving contemporary sharing practices. The authors consolidated findings from earlier work on motivations to share personal content, validating the set of motivating factors with the six selected non-media types of content. The results suggest that both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations affect content sharing practices. Furthermore, motivating factors were mapped to the reported positive and negative experiences, in order to understand their relation and to discuss their capacity to guide user experience design.