Arguably, the most popular word that has been thrown around amongst the collaborative consumption crowd for the last couple of years is “Access.” The Collaborative Consumption, or “sharing,” or “New Economy” movement (depending on your preferred nomenclature) has been, since inception, beating into our collective consciousness the idea that we do not need to tangibly own an item to make use of it as long as we are capable of “accessing” it.

But is “access” really the right word? In actuality, access is really just a word being used as a proxy to encapsulate a more abstract concept. That concept is really “an ability to derive utility.” Now, in practice, “access” is a fine word and I think its use is appropriate. Who really wants to go around saying “derive utility” all the time, anyway? However, it is important to take a step back and realize we do not merely mean literal, immediate, physical access. What we are really talking about is the ability to affect a change or experience something via some mechanism which one may not directly own.

Let’s first explore why the idea of “access” is so important. The idea of “access” first became important for the same reason collaborative consumption evolved. The importance is due to the burden of ownership. It can feel like an enormous weight, holding on to things we don’t use very often. We don’t need to own – and inevitably store - that punch bowl that only gets used once a year at a holiday party. Instead, we need to have access to a punch bowl, just in case.

The idea of access is an extremely powerful one. At Spare to Share, we like to think of it as a cloud for daily life; a virtual catalogue of useful items that one can access. We sync our iTunes to our iPhones or our Google Play to Androids, which allows us to experience our music from anywhere. And we can upload our documents onto DropBox or Google Drive, which gives us the option to view our documents anywhere and share our documents with people of our choice. So why not extend that same practice and mentality to stuff and space?

However, it is important to note that neither our music nor our documents are being accessed in their original form. Rather, we have an uploaded version in which we can listen to our music, but not the tangible CD. So, what we are really doing is deriving utility to experience our music. The same goes for our documents. Once we access the document via DropBox, we are no longer viewing it in Word, which decreases our editing powers. Again, we can access it, but it isn’t the total utility. Instead, we are deriving utility in order to experience the document without actually possessing it.

At this point you might be thinking, well you can always download your document from DropBox and have full editing power giving you total utility. Or what is the difference between the original version of the song and the uploaded version? There isn’t a difference – so is that not the total utility?

If that’s what you are thinking, you aren’t wrong. So, to better explain my point, let’s take this one step further.

The idea that we don’t have the total utility is best explained with an example of something we have never actually owned because today’s technological world gives us the ability to access things we have never tangibly been in contact with. Netflix and Hulu are probably the best modern examples. There was a time when the VCR and DVD player were revolutionary technologies that allowed people to view what they wanted to watch, when they wanted to watch it, and as often as they wanted. However, it required that we tangibly own and store every movie. Renting videos came next and seemed like the solution to clutter and/or wasted money on movies we only watched once. Technological progress and the inconvenience of the process eventually led to the evolution of streaming movies and TV shows. Now, we merely need one subscription to Netflix and we are given instant access to a fairly large variety of viewing options. But, Netflix can decide to take down a show or movie whenever they want. They don’t need our permission because they actually own the rights to that media. So we don’t have complete control of our access, and thus, the total utility; but rather, we have a derivative of utility that allows us to temporarily experience something through a mechanism that we do not own.

Tangibility does give us control of a utility, but that doesn’t mean we need tangibility to access something. For example, art does not need to be viewed in its original form. Though works of art are available at a museum, this doesn’t always mean it is accessible. Unless you live in Paris, it is unlikely that the original Mona Lisa is easily accessible to you. However, it is still moving to view it in an art history textbook or a poster. We don’t necessarily need to see the original piece to access its beauty. We are experiencing the beauty through a different mechanism. In doing so, we have changed our experience or maybe our perception without directly being able to access the painting. And though we have experienced some of the beauty, we have not accessed the painting’s total beauty. To experience the total utility of the painting, we require access to the original. Experiencing recreation is a perfect example of using the word “access” to mean “derive utility.”

With all the above examples, I think you can see that access takes on many definitions. In some cases it refers to items that we ourselves own in entirety – the total utility. Yet, in other cases we have just a small taste of the utility, like viewing the Mona Lisa in a textbook. And, of course, there is everything in-between. The term “access” has evolved into a variety of capacities that I like to call “The Access Spectrum,” which I will discuss in part 2 of this blog.

Part 2 available here http://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/access-really-right-word-collaborative-consumption-pt-2

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Gint Rudis is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Chicago-based Spare to Share www.sparetoshare.com a collaborative consumption platform that provides for sharing, renting, and selling of items and other goods with closed, known networks. Prior to entrepreneuring, Gint worked in finance and management consulting. Gint holds a BS in engineering from Vanderbilt University and regularly regrets having graduated in 4 years.