From the Creative Commons blog:
At the beginning of summer, many of you told us how much you share in a survey for Shareable Magazine. The results of that survey have been translated into a study of “The New Sharing Economy” by Shareable and Latitude Research. Visually, the study features nifty diagrams depicting what we share the most and how sharing has evolved over time. Substantively, “The New Sharing Economy” reveals some encouraging trends, such as that sharing in the virtual world makes people more comfortable with the idea of sharing in the physical world (in fact everyone in the study who shared online also shared offline), and that most of these people believe they will partake in even greater corporeal sharing in the next five years.
The survey itself is interesting stuff indeed. I particularly like this passage about generational similarities:
Sharing is a basic part of human life, so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that older generations were just as likely to share as Millennials. In fact, participants aged 40+ were more likely to feel comfortable sharing with anyone at all who joins a sharing community (with varying levels of community protections in place) and to perceive “making new friends” as a benefit of sharing, whereas Millennials tended to feel comfortable sharing only within smaller networks.* Attitudinally, however, Millennials were more likely to feel positively about the idea of sharing, more open to trying it, and more optimistic about its promise for the future.
I’m in a good mood today, but this "new" sharing economy is feels pretty insulting to me actually.
Why? It sounds like investor-seeking hyperbola of hipsters that slept through even the most basic introduction to economics and world history.
Consider how modern a concept real estate is in Western culture. Discover historic alternatives financial and business organizations the mostly persist to today (guildes, trade/labour unions, credit unions/ building society, co-operatives, socialism (theory & ideology)). The newest concept I can think of is micro-loans.
I like sharing, and I like open hardware and software. But it isn’t novel, it’s _familiar_. I have no idea what they’re teaching kids in kindergarten these days. 🙂