Studies in Sociology of Consumption support this thesis

26/1/2012 | Padova.  The collaborative consumption is a new business model which offers the possibility to create new market scenarios thanks to the re-discovering of concepts such as sharing, lending, barthering, trading, renting, gifting and swapping. We can start up new realities of consumption if we get out of patterns and preconception we’ve learned over time.

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In recent years, the rapid technological progress has led to important global changes which have significantly influenced lifestyles and cultures of the people; nowadays, you can get in touch with the world at any time, anywhere and live, thanks to smartphones, computers and every device that allow us to connect with other human beings in a great global network.
The natives of the digital age, which is the next generation, share everything in the digital domain (files, music, video...) and this inevitably leads to the creation of new relationships that go beyond distance, age or human ethnicity.

The speed and ease of interaction resulting by the advent of World Wide Web allow new ways to communicate, to exchange, to share, to trade... leading to increase the growth new markets. The main advantage of this model is the possibility to skip the middlemen: in fact, thanks to the possibility to come into direct contact with anyone you can avoid some required steps. A new kind of economy is borning.
An important example is Swap.com: it’s an internet portal where you can barther everything to everyone and everywhere. There are thousands of products that can be exhanged at no cost.
Several types of industry have been involved: ZipCar for car renting; Etsy to purchase handicraft items sold by private individuals; LandShare for sharing of land where to cultivate in a collaborative way; and the famous Couch Surfing, where you can find hospitality and avoid the inflated prices of the hotels.

Within the course of Sociology of Consumption, in Scuola Italiana Design we analyzed all these facts and then, in our turn, tried to develop some new ideas in order to better understand the issues faced during the study.

As we’ve seen, a new global scenario is growing up. It’s claim will no longer be “what we consume”, but “how we consume”. Most likely, this phenomenon will take more and more ground, outlining new ways of business and communication (and design), thus giving the opportunity for creative people to fight the crisis in an alternative way.

While you were reading these article millions of interactions took place everywhere thanks to the Internet: maybe collaborative consumption is the real future of the digital economy.

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Vanni Scapin

• Read last Click-News: Natural energy enlightening
  

Sources:

• www.rachelbotsman.com
• www.ted.com

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