[atari]

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?

[rantfoil]

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.

[atari]

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.