How can collaborative consumption, mobile & trust be combined ?

For the purposes of the course “Mobile Reputation” of the faculty of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University, we are asked to conduct a qualitative survey around the crucial subject of Collaborative consumption and mobile collaboration. This survey will examine how this new trend has penetrated into the life of a certain group of people, with several characteristics, or in our occasion, the gamers. Our goal is to find answers in certain questions such as “How important is collaboration in their circle?”, “How useful does the Internet tend to be?”, “Is the mobile devices usage a main contributor to their activity?”, “What about the trust between strangers while playing?”, “Does this tactic benefits them in an economic way?” and more.

But first of all, we couldn’t omit to make a research around the theme of Collaborative consumption and how mobile and internet activity is linked to it.

Since the ancient times people tend to collaborate so as to ensure their survival. They used to gather in groups and make collective efforts in order to live in better conditions. For example, they organized in a way to keep community members safe from external enemies or to store food for the winter. What is more, before they start to create the commercial and economical system as we know it today, these people used to exchange items depending on their needs. However, this practice presented a lot of faults and injustices, concerning the equivalence of the exchange objects, or even the trust between the sharing individuals.

Today, in the 21st century, we could easily support that we live in a hyper-connected world, whose economical and by extension, commercial situation seems to return at its original state. In other words, we begin to talk about a spreading sharing economy and for being even more specific, a worldwide-spreading sharing economy, thanks to technology.

At this point, it’s necessary to define what it’s actually that “sharing economy”; the system which allows us to borrow or rent assets owned by someone else. This phenomenon couldn’t be without Internet, that is the key to an easiest way of finding these assets. Specialists of the domain named this fact as “peer-to-peer” (peer2peer) rental market.

Sharing economy encloses the collaborative consumption, which, in controversy to commercial consumption that targets to one individual, aims to promote renting and exchanging between different members of a group. Collaborative consumption is actually the solution of the problem of “coincidence of wants”, as economists call it, which can be effortlessly accomplished by one click on the internet or by swiping of a smartphone app. For this reason, we can talk about a new sector, swap-trading, as Rachel Botsman (author and visiting academic at the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School) referred to at TEDxSydney Talk on 2010. The businesses depending at this new trend are various; eBay tends to be characterized as the ancestor of it, but today some of the most typical examples of how this system works are AirBnB, Zipcar, Quora and RocketHub.

One common thing that they share, is the internet activity. That means that we have the capability to observe a massive “mobile” collaboration, through the interested users, in order to exchange what they don’t need for what they do need, and finally create what we call “collaborative consumption”. This movement through the mobile devices is the reason why it is developing in such a rapid way.

Collaborative consumption tends to present several commercial but also cultural implications. Firstly, we couldn’t avoid to refer the change of consumer behavior. Until now, the commercial system has been characterized by passive consumers, who just went through a shop, found the wanted item, paid and left. Now, we become a lot more active. We are creators and collaborators. We do not throw away the unused objects, we share them and we communicate with others to achieve our aim.

In this point, hides the cause of the creation of the term “5th R” –reduce, reuse, recycle, repair, redistribute- that describes the way we are “stretching” the life cycle of the products today, through collaborative consumption. So, indisputably, we are facing an evolution, a passage from personal getting and spending to collective consumption. Thus, even if the 20th century was marked by consumerism and especially over-consumerism, the 21st century will be known as the great commercial turn to collaborative consumption.

Although, it’s essential to take under consideration perhaps the most significant factor that can lead these collaborative activities to a success; trust. Trust mechanisms are inextricably linked with these systems and that happens so as to create a reputation around the providing service and make it preferable by its competitors. While we are living in a global community where everyone is connected to every person around the world via social media, technology is enabling trust even between strangers. That’s why every user leaves his mark on the Web. We post, share, like each other and all together we rate services. Our signs at them can contribute to make a good or bad reputation. This fact actually presents how well we collaborate.

In conclusion, this new face that appeared in the market is depending on the theory that we really don’t want the stuff we buy; we want the needs or the experiences they fulfill. We want to solve problems. So, why not to solve our problem by helping someone else solve his problem, too? Like New York Times had highlight in an article about the new trend of sharing economy and collaborative consumption, “Sharing is to ownership what the ipod is to the 8 track, what solar power is to coal mine”.

Team: Sinekoglou Konstantina, Myrioti Agapi, Constantinidy Elena, Russu Sofia