A media symbolism perspective on the choice of social sharing technologies

The emergence of social sharing technologies, including blogs, microblogs, personal social networking sites, social bookmarking, and forums, has diversified the media through which information content can be shared. This study anchors on the concept of media symbolism to theorize about social sharing technologies. Our theorization is validated through a set of social sharing data, containing focus group interviews and more than 1 million observations on the content sharing behavior of online users. The results indicate that individuals prefer microblogs and social bookmarking, which are more open to accessing shared content from third-party sources, to share commercial contents.