Text Object - Final

What's Mine is Yours -The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.

My initial response, in something similar to it’s actual order of occurrence and construction, to the first part of What’s Mine is Yours.

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.

And, the book is about… collaborative consumption. More specifically, 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. Technology lets us jump the space/time gap in communications easily now, but it also lets us bypass one of the primary building blocks of relationships – proximity. The old style of collaborative consumption – that is, prior to mass production – was based around a proximity that we just don’t have to value anymore. The “new” collaborative consumption is on the rise using a new model of proximity; one created by the various mediums of digital communication.

I think it’s more than technology and the way I was raised though. Our society, as a whole, is one of mass-production and hyper-consumption. Throwaway living. 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. (The idea reminded me of this commercial from 2007). 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. Of course, the pessimist in me says that before this movement can really happen, on a national level, Wal-Mart (and it’s cousins) have to go under. And that will probably only happen around the apocalypse or a nuclear fallout, in which case collaborative consumption will likely be a matter of survival anyways. But still, 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.