Very interesting, especially the finding that online sharing predicts offline sharing. The authors of the article say that it's "largely because they are learning to trust each other online" although I haven't seen that in the data they've posted yet. Looking forward to the rest of the study. Thanks for sharing!
I'm not convinced that online sharing has caused offline sharing, although there are examples of online communities such as couchsurfing that have brought online communities offline.
This seems like a case of correlation not equalling causation. These are probably the people that are more likely to be trusting and sharing both online and off.
That said, people have been sharing for millennia, so are we just now learning to trust each other, and is it because of the internet?
Things like Airbnb don't exist without the Internet -- fundamentally they connect people who wouldn't have met any other way.
It's about building communities that didn't exist before. That's significant. The modality is the difference. People didn't have a reliable and simple and cheap and instant way to connect. Now they do.
Agreed. My point is that there are certain people that would likely be predisposed to share anyway. And although the internet has provided new opportunities for sharing, other types have occurred in different communities (village, folk, scientific, etc.) for ages.
Basically, new opportunities don't mean that people wouldn't have shared or weren't sharing in other ways.
It will be interesting to see if this type of personal socialism will continue in the future. There is now an entire generation of people exposed to individual “ownership” in the form of failed mortgages, crushing debt, and failed lending institutions.
To me, people who car-share have prioritized access over ownership as a lifestyle. Plenty of people who own cars occasionally rent a vehicle from Avis (say, when they travel or when their car is in the shop)—so that seems a little different than being a Zipcar member.
More directly to your point, the end of the report (PDF) also addresses the evolving notion of what "sharing" means to people these days.
