Maybe you’ve heard of Thorstein Veblen. No? He was the Norwegian-American economist and sociologist who coined the term “conspicuous consumption.” As it turns out, Veblen coined another term that didn’t quite worm its way as deeply into our popular culture. That would be “vicarious consumption.”

It essentially said this: The consumer choices exhibited by one person sometimes work to the credit of another. When we see a butler in a tuxedo, a benefit accrues not to the butler but his “master.” The butler is consuming vicariously for his boss.

A hundred years later, it now appears that Veblen might have been on to something. It’s being suggested that we might be on the cusp of a new social networking trend that’s being called The Vicarious Experience in which consumers will have the ability to live vicariously through the lives of complete strangers.

I have a neighbor whose 20-something son has been trekking about southeast Asia for several months now. He’s travelled the Ho Chi Minh trail, hiked into the mountains of Cambodia, lived with fishermen in Sri Lanka.

What if he were to film his experiences, put the footage up several times a week onto a private videoblog, maybe post some daily journal entries. Now imagine thousands of people doing that, feeding their life experiences into a kind of experiential Craig’s List.

Fascinating stuff.