Latitude

Last week, outside my local cafe in Cambridge, MA (Central Square), I quite literally stumbled upon “The Stranger Exchange,” a kind of physical, hyperlocal lovechild of Freecycle and PostSecret (a crowdsourced, “sharing” Craigslist + an anomymous community art project, that is).

Here’s how it works:

The wonderful irony is that the creator of The Stranger Exchange opted to repurpose an abandoned newspaper box for his project, borrowing from a number of themes in new and evolving media–crowdsourcing, a sense of personal narrative, and a renewed interest in hyperlocal surroundings (and physical spaces in general, via the rise of mobile).

Here’s what to put in it:

These are a few of the suggestions for items to leave, as posted on Pandora’s the box’s front window.

Books, movies, old pictures, new pictures, report cards, post cards, love letters, rumors, business cards, questions, answers, origami, keys to nowhere, coupons, dirty looks, self-portraits, surprises, etc.

Brought to you by: new notions of community cohesiveness

Admittedly, I was hesitant to open the box (its window being opaque), but this is what I found:

Not only were there things in the box but, the next day, its things weren’t missing; in fact, they were different.

The social implications surrounding pervasive digital connectivity–the way we form new relations (often moving fluidly from virtual to physical worlds), engender community cohesiveness even across far-distant locales, and feel that we exist independent of our physical selves–suggests a kind of unspoken credo governing theft and equal [stranger] exchange.

“People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Newmark [Craigslist's eponym] says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves.

Interview with Craig Newmark, Wired

In a news-shell: new economics

A new sharing economy seems to be springing up–an understanding that continuous access to non-rival goods (like information) is just as satisfying as owning them, and that we can intelligently manage access needs for rival goods (like physical objects); that is, we needn’t buy DVDs if Netflix serves them up on demand, and we needn’t buy cars if we can find them waiting at a nearby Zipcar lot anytime we need them. In a similar vein, we can crowdsource needs for physical objects via community exchange programs like Freecycle.

The Stranger Exchange isn’t branded as a Freecycle, but its online forum (just begun) gives it potential to develop organically into something like this, with a fixed, hyperlocal drop point.

(One has to wonder what kinds of opportunities emerge when digital access to location-relevant information meets public spaces.)

For the nonce

For now, The Stranger Exchange looks to be a microcosmic example of social & physical discovery through sharing and community-based, [anomymous] storytelling (the latter being a desire to hurl impactful tidbits of one’s personal narrative, unattached–all the more impactful because of their dissociation with a quantifiable, single persona–into the vast expanse of connected space, and to hope that they resonate with others, if not outright echo back).

Are there any other great projects out there in this vein, somewhere along the physical-digital spectrum?