Collaborative consumption
There’s an excellent guest post on Swissmiss by Rachel Botsman about the rise of what she’s calling “collaborative consumption.” Basically, it’s the idea that instead of owning everything you might need in your life, people are turning to new methods of sharing products, services, and ideas. It’s not a new concept, but in our current economic and environmental situations these new technology-driven businesses are reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume.
A couple of years ago I started to notice instead of friends bragging about their new Prius, they boasted how they had given up their cars altogether by becoming “Zipsters” (members of the car-sharing service Zipcar). More and more people were selling stuff on craigslist and eBay, swapping books, DVDs, and games on sites such as Swaptree, and giving unwanted items away on Freecycle. Local sharing platforms such as NeighborGoods and Share Some Sugar started popping up alongside a whole range of peer-to-peer rental services such as RelayRides and Zilok. On a trip to Denver, I saw cyclists pedaling around on bright red bikes with the word B-Cycle on their crossbars. A friend in London told me about her new favorite Channel 4 TV program called Landshare (a garden ‘dating agency’ connecting growers to people with land to share). I kept hearing about people joining some kind of collective or co-op, from Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs to Etsy Labs. Magazines, blogs and journals brimmed with popular articles from the self-organizing behavior of ants to “Coworking: Solo But Not Alone”. Whether it was ‘peer-to-peer,’ to the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to ‘smart mobs’ to ‘flashmobs’ to ‘prosumption’ to ‘crowdsourcing’, numerous sticky ideas were emerging on how easy it is to form groups, pods, packs, hubs or whatever you want to call them, and the might of communities.
This is definitely a trend that I’ve noticed in the past few years, and hopefully it will only continue to grow. Obviously we’ll never be sharing underwear or anything like that, but I think well-designed systems like this can create good—if not better—experiences for consumers. Rachel has co-authored a new book on the topic titled What’s Mine is Yours.
www.collaborativeconsumption.com
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