The Straits Times
19 December 2017
- RSIS
- Media Mentions
- Car-sharing May Dent Hard-driving Male Ego
Car-sharing May Dent Hard-driving Male Ego
I think that the advent of common shared cars would be a positive thing for society in the long run. It will certainly diminish whatever fetish value that cars might have as individual statements of largesse or prosperity, but on a wider scale it also speaks about our capacity to share and live socially as interdependent beings.
While some of the innovations in other fields of technology and IT may pose a threat to professions or even wipe out entire classes of professionals, this is one development that can actually bring society closer together, and make us reconsider our own personal understanding of what constitutes the private and the public.
The technophiles may therefore be right after all in this case, for a world where cars are common shared property would be one where our selfish egos are tempered and controlled by technology that equalises.
It may well pave the way for an attitudinal shift, from the idea that ‘I am what I own and drive’ to ‘we are what we share together’. And that, in the long run, is not a bad thing after all.
… Farish A Noor is associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.
RSIS / Online / Print
Last updated on 20/12/2017
