Did you know that we share 99.9% of our DNA with the person sitting next to us? We share a lot of things in common with numerous different things in this world, but have you ever wondered why we feel the need to share information with each other? Although it may seem like a simple question to answer, the truth is it is a lot more interesting than you might think.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why we are compelled to share information and how that has led to our success.

We Share Things That Make Us Who We Are

We build our personal, product, and corporate brands on what we share.

The need to discover and present who we are through creativity and knowledge, also known as self-actualization, is a major driving force behind our need to share information. 68% of people share information that they say helps define themselves to others and 69% say they share information because it makes them feel more involved with the world and events taking place outside their sphere of control.

What we put out into the world through sharing is what we feel defines our character; we spend our time sharing information, knowledge, ideas, and feelings in order to build what becomes our own personal ‘brand’. In this way sharing is one of the key ways others identify us and how we individualize ourselves to others. This process of personal ‘brand’ building is one of the keys for building and maintaining good, healthy relationships and successfully implementing collaboration strategies.

We Share Things to Provide Value

Sharing information is what drives innovation.

According to a New York Times study , 49% of what content people share is seen as valuable or entertaining. This makes sense as one of the main reasons we share is to educate or provide new information to those in our sphere of influence. Sharing things of value with others allows us to bring the ‘group’ to the same level of expertise, without expending multiple individuals’ time and effort to learn independently from the start.

Without the instinctive need to share value we would probably still be trying to learn how to light our first fire or we’d probably be extinct. Our accomplishments over the past 10,000 years or so are directly impacted by our recognition that value passed to others not only allows for our personal success, but also the success of the ‘group’ as a whole.

This natural instinct to share things of value is one of the particular human features that has allowed us to continue to build upon one another’s successes and contributes to our continued drive for new innovation.

We Share Things to Remind and Remember

How do you think we remember the moon landing?

Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of information sharing. Long before video and audio recording, and even writing, we told stories to pass information. We may not think of it very often, but much of our past has been told to us through stories; stories from the hunt painted on a cave wall, the Rosetta Stone unlocking Egyptian hieroglyphic mythology, or ancient historians who wrote of the fall of Rome many years after the fact, these works of communication help to remind us of our past and where we come from.

Much more recently we now document our activities on a daily basis. Youtube, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, each one of these tools allows us to record, remember, and share our lives so that in some ways we can be like the ancient Egyptians and not be forgotten.

We record and share important events so that we can remember our own experiences, as our memories aren’t always the sharpest tools in the box after several years, and remind others of our existence. In fact, 78% of people share information online to grow and nourish relationships and stay connected. Our willingness to record and share comes in part from our need to be remembered and to remind others of us and our lives. As the saying goes “History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes”, without our collective recording or sharing of information we may have been condemned to repeat ourselves and never learn from our experiences.

Finishing the Story