Mapping the Sharing Economy
S haring is the joint utilization of an asset or space. In its narrow sense, it alludes to joint or rotating utilization of naturally limited goods, for example, a shared residence. It is likewise the way toward partitioning and distributing. Sharing can happen through: large assets like land, products like toys, and values. The most important sharing happens through cultures and revolves around values and beliefs. What is good and bad , right or wrong,virtuous or sinful, all are vallues and beliefs passed collectively through time. Societies have always maintained a culture of sharing for different reasons. The most important reason is survival. “Man is a political animal”. He cannot live without being a part of a society, and to be a part of society, man must learn how to share and exchange goods, knowledge, values and beliefs in order to live in harmony and agreement. However, social sharing isn’t beneficial for all people. It is somehow one sided. The benefits usually reach the people accepted in the society and whom are similar; it harms those who are different. For example, Americans once shared the belief that Indians are dangerous and must be killed: this shared belief benefited the Americans where they got what they wanted , while it harmed the indians who were killed and tortured. The shared values of friendship , trust, collaboration and connections all are agreed upon the groups that are similar in the culture and those who agreed upon their definitions. These values are the core requirements for the formation of sharing and society. They are considered as the social capital. Social capital refers to the factors that effectively function social groups : interpersonal relationships. In order for people to practice sharing in it’s ways, they must have basic interpersonal characteristics. One can only share things with persons he can trust or he is friends with. People can also share profits or products or assets with others whom they have connections with in someway. The neighbors you live with on the same land have connections with you. In the absence of those concepts of social capital, it is nearly impossible to share with another person.
On the other hand, social media have changed alot in the process of sharing and functioning of social capital. The way values and social capital are categorised, shared and classifed is alterred through the means of social media in it’s bloggers and influencers. People who are active on social media are the ones who aquire the social capital and social media institutions agree upon it. Even if we don’t know them, we trust influencers and bloggers, appeal to be friends with them and feel some sort of connection with them. The benefits of social capital are no longer distributed evenely in the society, but associated with the people digitally active and the owners of social media institutions.
“Social capital operates on the premise that our investment in relations with others helps us to better achieve our goals.” Our control on the social capital spread on the social networks is limited. However, social networks have made it easier to express new and trending values and factors of social capital; under the condition of being socially active. The audience of the social media and social media institutions decide on wether the social capital generated by a person is to be accepted and worked with or not. Media institutions can alter the control we have on the kind of social capital we generate.
In the end, social media like twitter, Facebook and Google is having the major control over the world population’s lives. It has made life much easier and transformed the world into a smaller place where ideas, people and values are shared from all over the world. Ofcorse , the control and financial gains such institutions have are justified by the power people give them; in every minute of a person’s life, a social media intermediary is being used by him/her. We cannot stop using social media for more than an hour; even in our sleep, our accounts are still working. We owe social media intermediaries alot for how they made our lives and duties much easier. Nonetheless, people are considered stakeholders by the social capital they invest in them and they might have rights they can ask for. But, if in the first place, people don’t pay a fee for using these intermediaries and investing their time and work in them, what kind of rights can people acquire? If people stop investing in social media , how will they function? In these question lies the fact that we as people must be able to acquire financial benifits from these channels; for, without us, they’d loose a lot. In this atmosphere, people can pressure the intermediaries inorder to stop this notion of exploitation. “A crucial first step is to tax digital monopolies in order to channel these resources into the funding of alternatives.” Many alternatives were suggested before and some were already present which makes them updatable. For example, “Club 2.0 is an updated version of Club 2 in the age of social media. It would be live broadcast on television and on an online video platform (C2Tube). Club 2.0’s broadcasts are open-ended, live, and uncensored.”
Life is changing, people are, but some things are crucial and can never be changed. For example, the importance of society sharing to survive. Therefore, people must work on keeping their control over the social capital and make it a collective investment rather than controlled by a bunch of people or sectors. People collectively must form the pressure on social media sectors and not vice versa.
