Here’s an internet prediction: As the cost of publishing the things you have and the things you want decreases linearly, the volume of non-monetary exchange (lending, sharing, donating things) will increase exponentially.

Open web services that connect ISBNs (for books) and UPCs (for DVDs, games, and other durables) to data about products enable bloggers to unambiguously identify what products they wish to peddle on online marketplaces like eBay. In the coming years, blogging the products we own will be further simplified when barcode- and RFID readers become embedded in cheap everyday handheld devices such as cell phones.

I think there’s reason to believe that the resulting change in social behavior will not be just quantitative—not just more eBay, more Amazon. It was the portal-driven Web of the 1990s that brought forth the revolution in retail and classifieds. This time it will be different.

The shift to a blog-driven Web can set in motion a new, lively circulation of pre-owned products among networks of friends who play with the dynamics of social capital, not financial capital. Where Amazon pioneered the Web’s retail layer, and eBay pioneered the bargaining layer, a service like Mediachest could pioneer a new lending layer in product circulation. Up until now, this layer has existed off-line, but it has been limited to enclosed and perishable social pockets where discoveries of eligible products in a suitable person’s possession is largely a matter of chance, and lack of appropriate forum for exchanging lending / sharing / donating initiatives complicates the face-saving rituals.

Some distinct characteristics of the emerging online lending layer:

– First, it is about retail products, but unlike Amazon, it is not about retail transactions. Rather, it’s about recycling, swapping, donating and borrowing (mostly) pre-owned products.

– Second, it’s about moving material goods, but unlike eBay, it doesn’t require national or global logistics. It’s about very local logistics—not the suburban neighborhoods as much as the trust-based interpersonal networks that inhabit every institution in our society: the workplace, the school, the sports team, the hospital, the university dorm.

– Third, it may not be about PC users as much as it is about mobile users (although that is contingent on the trend of more hackable mobile terminals).

– And finally, the emerging online small worlds oriented around non-money-based circulation of material objects might not at first reach many of the more affluent 30 to 40-somethings. But they are much more likely to reach their kids—or get originated by them.

Today at her seminar Lucy quoted Brian Bloomfield on the boundaries that the use of a technological system can create for thought. The system in question is in the UK National Health Service, but the point is very relevant to social software (such as weblogs and wikis):

Once we had embarked upon the journey afforded us by the system, only a certain terrain was open to inspection; we could debate the the features of that terrain as made visible through the menus, records, and displays of the information system, but we could not switch the machine off and debate alternative landscapes; we could zoom in on details down to the level of records pertaining to individual treatment regimes for a given patient, or pull back and purview the architecture of the database as a whole, but we could not escape the boundaries implicitly defined by using the system.

See (Bloomfield 1991, p. 717).

I’m posting from the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference in San Diego. My pick from this morning was the phrase ‘drying out’ from a talk by Molly Steenson and Michael Kieslinger from Ivrea: the young Filippino women whose SMS traffic was the focus of the Ivrea study had coined this phrase to refer to lukewarm response to persons the group no longer wanted to hang out with.

Drying out connects to a question I’ve wanted to ask Reid Hoffman, who designed the professional networking service LinkedIn, especially after watching the streaming video of a talk he gave at Stanford. Here’s the leader to my question:

In LinkedIn search results people are ranked according to their number of connections. The impression is: the more connections a person has, the more social capital she possesses. Clearly this motivates some people to go out of their way to climb up the ladder. It is a game of growing one’s list of contacts, a perpetual pile-up race to maintain one’s position in the ranking.

Now, relating LinkedIn’s encouragement of such behavior to sociological theorizing about the dynamics of social capital is the point of my question. When studying immigrant communities, World Bank sociologist Michael Woolcock observed that people didn’t grow their networks in a linear fashion. Instead, after a certain saturation point, to move ahead in their lives and enter new spheres of interaction, people had to break the bonds with their existing networks. This was often a painful experience. In Filippino lingo, people had to dry out their old friends to make new ones. The image is one of cyclical renewal of a limited network of meaningful contacts rather than linear growth of an ever-growing Rolodex of futilities.

So my question is this: Should Woolcock be right, and should the same LinkedIn users who now spend their energy growing their networks one day want to do the opposite, and get rid of their excess contacts, how might they dry out these “friends” gracefully?