Huffington Post: Sharing Is Trending

“Anyone vaguely familiar with social media sites such as Facebook will know that the word ‘share’ has come to mean a button we press when we want to prove to our 900 or so friends (sorry, ‘friends’) that we have a great social life or excellent music taste.

The good news is that sharing means a great deal more and has been undergoing something of a renaissance of late. This isn’t just a hearkening back to the good old days when, aged ten, you would receive plastic bags full of mud-stained hand-me-downs every time you went to visit Auntie Mabel. No, this is twenty-first century sharing where goods, skills and ideas can be exchanged on a scale never before possible.

So far, mainstream coverage of this mass sharing, also known as collaborative consumption, has tended to focus on the economic impacts of sharing, namely the rise of the sharing economy. This is significant because it points to a growing recognition that large-scale sharing is set to disrupt the very foundations of neoliberal capitalism, namely growth. Companies whose success is predicated on people’s desire for individual ownership of goods are starting to wake up to the fact that radically new business models built around peer-to-peer marketplaces are emerging. Fast.” – Tess Riley, Huffington Post

To read more of Tess Riley from Streetbank‘s views on why collaborative consumption is on an upwards streak, visit Huffington Post.