The Rise of collaborative Consumption.
We've all heard "don't judge a book by it's cover." Apparently I don't. While I did notice, from an artistic viewpoint, the repetition and symbol use of the cover's design, I did nothing more than that. Rather, my first impression of the book came from the inside of cover. I meant to flip through the book, take a look at the layout before actually sitting down to read; instead, I only opened the cover, and was greeted with this odd little box very similar to those student/year/condition tables in some of my high school text books.
"Barter, swap, or pass on this book."
Now this… this is just weird. Never in my life have I seen something like this in a book. There was a haiku travel bug in a geocache, but travel bugs are meant to be moved around and tracked. Books are not. Books belong on shelves. Buy, read, shelve. Re-read, re-shelve. Having known nothing about the book -aside from the fact that I should've bought it three days earlier- this piqued my interest considerably. What was this book about? Why did the authors incorporate this encouragement to pass the book on? What where they hoping to accomplish? What point were they attempting to make to the reader? It made a good primer.
Collaborative consumption using the internet and social networking. You should understand a few things: I'm young, I'm sheltered, we don't answer the phone or the door, we're not friends with our neighbors, I don't leave my house if I don't have to. Collaborative consumption is barely even a romantic concept to me. I'm blaming it on the way I was raised. My folks got twitchy if I was late because I gave someone a ride home. And god forbid I let a stranger in a pinch use my cell phone, or do business on craigslist. The ideas of borrowing and trading, 'gift communities', sharing resources, etc. are just… they're anachronisms.
I was also taught, too well perhaps, not to trust people online. You don't know who they are; they could be anyone. Airbnb and CouchSurfing? That's a serious shift in perspective. But is there really a difference between someone advertising a room for rent on airbnb and advertising in a newspaper? No, there really isn't. I wouldn't trust one more than the other. While there are a lot of psycho people in the world, they're aren't as many as protective parents would lead us to believe. I do not really want to think about how they would react to me finding a place to stay through CouchSurfing if I go to Roswell over spring break.
Throwaway living. I love this phrase, because I know it's ture. I still believe my '87 Nissan Maxima with 70,000 miles and a short in the wiring is more reliable than my '07 Malibu. Very few things are built to last anymore. They are built to work a while, and then break so you have to buy a new one. No repeat business, no profit, after all. We are in a consumption based society - paying for things we don't need but have been told that we want, things that are not likely to enhance our quality of life. Collaborative consumption breaks the system a bit. Enough. Even things as small as reusing, recycling, or re-gifting break this throwaway behavior pattern. The financial downturn spurred it forward, and social networking makes it easier. If I don't need something anymore, maybe I know someone who does. Maybe someone I know knows someone else. A status post on facebook or a tweet is a quick way to find out.
Ride sharing, bartering, trading, gifting… they also seem like really good ways to develop relationships and, on a larger level, a closer knitted community than what I have seen my whole life. Maybe I'll write my name and a note in my book and hand it off to someone else when I'm finished reading it.
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