Gift Economy and the Web

This post marks the start of me beginning to think about trying to talk about starting to think about my ideas orbiting around the subject of creating a online social environment that fosters a high level of open and public exchange in the non-linear and many-to-many environment of the web.

My starting point is with the concept of a gift economy, which is founded on the concept of the social bond/contract created when a gift is given that encourages the receiver to reciprocate in some way in the future. The idea of a gift economy takes this informal contract created when gifts are exchanged between individuals and abstracts it to cover a the exchanges made between a whole community. Where as the bond created by the giving of gift is traditionally seen as having a one-to-one relationship the idea of a gift economy deals with the giving of gifts to strangers and in this context re-evalutes that dynamic as being a one-to-many relationship. Although the gift is directed at one individual, because they are unknown to the giver the gift can be seen as being given to the whole community and this is especially true in digital space where the gift isn’t tied to a physicality. Through this dynamic a environment or economy can develop where people feel comfortable giving gifts that they do not expect to be directly reciprocated because they know that others in the same community will be willing/able to provide a gifts to help them when they want it. In this dynamic a gift given is a gift to the community and as well as possibly creating a bond between individuals it creates a bond and a social contract between individuals and a community.

As I mentioned briefly earlier it is much easier for a gift economy to form and grow in digital space compared to when the gifts are tied to physical space. This is because when a gift is given to a stranger in meatspace, that gift is only given to the community in an abstract sense because the gift can only actually be given to one person. In contrast a gift given in digital space - on the internet - can actually be available to everybody in the community because of the infinite replicability of digital artefacts, which makes the nature of the gift much more apparent and useable to the community. This makes the bonds created through altruistic giving in digital a community so much easier to develop than in a physical community.

Gift economies with a solid community foundation are difficult to develop online despite their nature being very well suited to the dynamics of the web. A gift to the community may be less abstract online but the community itself is much more abstract because it is not tied to physical space and therefore its occupants are not visible unless they make themselves so by contributing. Any online gift economy must find someway to centralise its members - while also allowing their numbers to grow - so they can perceive the community they are participating in in order to be able to engage in a social contract with it.

There is also the more fundamental issue with forming a gift economy: how does the economy start? Putting aside the issues to do with creating the right interface and structure to enable a economy to develop there is still the issue of how to motivate people to start sharing and to get them to do it in a way which is forms the foundations of a gift economy. Charles Leadbeater suggests that successful examples of mass collaboration are often sparked by a significant gift to the community by and individual or organisation which pulls a community around it through individuals desire to take advantage as well as extend the value of the gift. He cites Linus Torvald’s gift of his Linux kernel as an example of how a valuable gift can generate a community around it and a kind of gift economy centralised around a developing an initial substantial gift.

Online gift economies don’t only focus around a single artefact or topic, they can relate to a space, interface or medium. The reason mass collaboration is more common and more obvious when related to working on an artefact is that it provide clear context and definition for the community, with gift economies founded around a space and a medium communities aren’t as easily drawn together and often require a core of users to be organised in a more formal structure which is often linked to established communities in meatspace. For example Twitter started being used internally in the office of its creators (Obvious Corp.) and after a extended period of use it was released to the wider public. Similarly Facebook started as a service for only available to students of Harvard university. By targeting an established community rooted in physical space a more abstract gift economy can gain a launching platform from which to then diversify and draw members from all different areas of online society.

I’ll finish here for now, although there is still a lot of area to be covered, especially in terms of how an interface can be designed to harness a gift economy (this area will also be discussed in relation to my final project for Interactive Media degree in further posts). In addition to gift economies I will also be talking about ideas of collective organisation and perhaps the public sphere.

If there are areas relating to this topic that you think would aid the discussion of these issues or if there are areas of my discussion that you feel I’ve skimmed over or made unclear please let me know in the comments.