Collaborative Consumption
We are at the start of the “Big Shift” away from the 20th century defined by hyper-consumption towards the 21st century, an age of Collaborative Consumption.
Rachel Botsman notes that we are moving from being "passive consumers" to "highly-enabled collaborators". The peer-to-peer (P2P) revolution is founded on our primate instincts - we were born and bread to share and cooperate with each other; we have done so for thousnads of years whether we hunted in packs or farmed in co-ops until hyper consumption took over in the 20th C. She foresees the 21st C moving from a "culture of me" to a "culture of we", highlighting the four key drivers behind this revolution:
- A renewed belief in the importance of community
- A torrent of P2P social networks & real time technologies
- Pressing environmental concerns
- The global recession which has shocked consumer behaviours
These four factors are fusing a shift towards collaborative consumption, forming three creative forms of consumption:
- Redistribution market - (e.g. swap tree) where we see items being reduced, rused, recycled, repaired and redistributed
- Collaborative lifestyles - (e.g. couchsurfing, co-working, landsharing) where resources and skills are being shared
- Product-service systems (PSS) - (e.g. car sharing, tool sharing) where we as users pay for the benefit (or utility) of product without owning a product outright (a.k.a. alternative ownership). This is most relevant for high idling capacity items such as (power drills, lawn mowers, cars, etc)
Take home message: access is better then ownership, uses trumps possessions!
She closes by saying that "we are entering a period where we're waking up from a humungous hangover of emptiness and waste and taking a leap to create a more sustainable system that is built to serve our innate needs for community and individual identity. This will possibly be referred to as a revolution - from individually centered consumption to a rediscovery of collective good".
