Global Sharing Day was celebrated on June 1st. At Near Me, we decided to celebrate Global Sharing all week by hosting a few events in San Francisco. By having a Global Sharing Day picnic lunch in the park and a Collaborative Happy Hour with our sharing economy startup friends, we thought a lot about sharing in relation to our normal work day.

Here are some of the thoughts that surfaced this week:

• Why aren’t more people spending time with others over lunch? Taking a break from work, engaging in conversation and being outside can really help our emotional well being. At our lunch, each person shared a part of their lunch with the group and we engaged in conversation with those who had RSVPed to attend and the people who joined us upon invite that happened to be in the park that day.

• Community should be a priority. Society tells us that all you need is yourself, but social media and the sharing economy is teaching us it’s ok to need people. We want to be heard, encouraged and we want human to human engagement. It’s part of being a healthy adult.

• We’ve been reshaped. Sharing encourages people to experience their peers in a way that was natural for thousands of years but because of various issues that our modern-day society suffers from (such as not being able to enjoy a dinner with friends without looking at our smartphones), we’ve lost the art of truly getting to know the people around us. Whether it’s our neighbor, officemates, local businesses and more, we’ve become so individualized and disconnected while being the most connected we’ve ever been online.

A few of us discussed what birthed these issues and it led us to the relationship we have with our digital and real world.

The digital world has, in some ways, given us a false sense of community when we're, for example, zoned in our smartphone during our entire lunch break instead of engaging in conversations with the people around us or enjoying the peace that being still can bring. But, at the same time the online network has helped us connect with friends from all over the world in a way that could never be done before. It seems as if what is bringing us together is also pulling us apart.

So, what could the future look like if we could connect the new behaviors of the digital world (social networking) with real life (human to human community)? At one point, we were all excited to bring networking from offline to online. But now, we’re craving the humanness that comes from disconnecting from the internet and communicating in real life.

Is the real solution a healthy balance between digital and real life where people know how to engage online and offline without losing who they are? Without feeling like they’re “missing out” without their newsfeed? A time where our virtual and real life communities are so intertwined that they need each other to function best? 

Could this be why our society is moving towards the sharing economy? Maybe the sharing economy or collaborative economy is more than a shift in commerce but a sociological shift. Is the sharing economy in the form of technology and human to human interaction, the balance we actually need between technology and real life?

Enjoy some of our photos from our Collaborative Happy Hour and share your thoughts on the post below!