Two ShareRing team members, Helen and Alayne went out and walked the streets of Melbourne CBD to observe and discover sharing services that are all around us.
The basic understanding of what ‘sharing’ is, can be seen through multiple lenses. You have your general sharing of objects, such as renting items you need for a short period of time, renting a venue you need for an event or renting a dvd to watch at home. Sharing can also be seen as borrowing, such as borrowing your neighbors lawn mower or borrowing your friends suit or dress you only need for a few hours. These types of ‘sharing’ are what most people tend to think of when hearing the term ‘sharing’, but there are many other ways of thinking about how people share things.
In your daily, everyday life, you access sharing services or items that you might not even realise. When you go to the supermarket, you are actually sharing or borrowing the supermarkets trolley or basket to collect your items while you browse the store. When you take your clothes to the dry cleaner, you are renting out their equipment or the cleaner themselves to get your clothes cleaned and neatly pressed.
If you have ever attended a concert or event that was held at a venue, the person on stage or the performer is renting the stage and the venue owner is sharing their stage with the performer. Even companies like Netflix where you stream whatever you want to watch without having to own the movie or T.V series, you are actually sharing it through their service.
If you can take a step back and think about all the items you use on a daily basis, and then think about how much of them you actually ‘own’, the answer is probably not a lot. It doesn’t make sense to own your own plane if you can access the same services by going through commercial flights, right? You are sharing the plane and the crew with those around you on that commercial plane because you don’t own them or the plane!
It is pretty incredible when you realise how much you actually do share on a daily basis, when you think outside of the sharing box. We encourage all of our community members to take a step back in their daily lives, and take a giant step forward into the sharing sphere and see where their lives are affected by sharing services in places they might not have realised.
Go out, explore your city or town that you live in and try and identify all the sharing actives you take part in that you had not thought about before. It is an eye opening experience and can change your perspective of how much sharing actually affects your life, and how awesome the sharing economy is!
