It Ain’t What You Share (It’s The Way That You Share It): The Surprising Regulation of Sharing in Private BitTorrent File-Sharing Communities

• In Event: Life (and Death) Online: Identities, Communities, and Commodities

Abstract

This paper is about the ways that members of private BitTorrent sites talk about the mechanisms used to monitor the extent to which they are sharing files in a reciprocal fashion. These mechanisms—known as share ratio enforcement—exist so that file sharers upload as much data as they download. File sharing is an arena in which we can see the metaphor of ‘sharing’ at work and enquire into its modus operandi there, both by looking at the ways in which the word is used, as well as the ways it is explicitly highlighted as a resource in attempts to shape the moral contours of the file sharing endeavor. Analysis of forum discussions about share ratios reveals a number of counter-intuitive findings, for instance, that sometimes the way to contribute to a file-sharing community is by not sharing. The deployment of the word ‘sharing’ as a rhetorical strategy is discussed.

Author

• Nicholas A. John, Hebrew U of Jerusalem