Online gift cultures: From the Potlatch to the
‘Thank You’ economy. A historical perspective
on the changing gift economies
Student name: Gina Chereches Thesis submitted: August 14, 2015
ginac@protonmail.com
Thesis advisor: Carolin Gerlitz Graduate School of New Media University of Amsterdam
Abstract
This paper examines the emergence of online gift economies, by combining a historical perspective on the characteristics and specificity of primitive and online gift cultures, with a case based approach, in which Impossible and other gift-centered platforms are analyzed from a platform-based perspective. Using the dichotomous model between gift and market exchange as an analytical tool, the paper first identifies key characteristics of gift cultures, such as social relations, identity-formation, reciprocity, competition, social reputation and prestige. Second, it looks at how these characteristics of gifts are altered by the advent of various online platforms and social media. Throughout the paper, the argument is made that emergent gift-centered platforms cannot be studied without taking into consideration the entangled relationships between gift exchange and different kinds of market- or web born economies such as the hit, link or like economy. Following the same logic of commercial social platforms, Impossible seeks to implement its own currency, through its own social buttons and in the form of metrified thanks, which can be later exchanged in commodities. The intervention that Impossible and other gift-centered platforms make in a highly commercialized social web, points at the vitality of gifts and gift-giving practices, as well as at how deep gifts are embedded in society.
Keywords: gift economies, gift cultures, social relations, exchange, online currencies, thank you economy, web economies, social web, platform studies
Table of contents
Introduction ……….. 5
1. Tribal gifts and the moral economy
1.1 The notion of the gift and the gift economy……… 9 Ideological forms of gift and market exchange………….. 11 The gift - market dichotomy………... 12 1.2 Traditional gift cultures and their corresponding moral economy 16 The Potlatch………. 16 The Kula Ring……….. 18 Relationships, reciprocity and moral obligations…………. 19 The market economy of primitive cultures……….. 21
2. Online gifts and the knowledge economy
2.1 The emergence of the gift economy on the early Internet……… 24 The New Left and the Sixties……….. 24 The concept of community ………. 25 Early sharing networks, communities and online gifts…... 27 2.2 The mixed economy of the informational web………. 31
The hit and link economy………. 33 2.3 Online gift cultures vs. primitive gift cultures……….. 35
3. Social media gifts and the like economy
3.1 The social web and the like economy………... 39 3.2 Social media gifts……… 43
The online profile……… 44 Twitter and the metrification of tweets, retweets and favs 48
Hospitality as a gift on Couchsurfing……… 49
Social gifts on YouTube……… 50
4. Gift-centered platforms and the thank you economy 4.1 Impossible ……… 53
Front-end analysis………... 55
Relationships inside and outside Impossible…….. 69
Back-end analysis………... 72
How networks create worlds……… 74
4.2 Other gift-centered platforms……… 76
ServiceSpace and KindSpring………. 76
Freecycle……….. 83
Conclusion………... 86
5
Introduction
Impossible1 is a social networking platform for good deeds launched in May 2013. The platform invites people to “be part of the gift culture with impossible: a social giving network that let's you wish and shows you wishes you may be able to grant” while its mission is to “make the 'impossible' possible" as Lily Cole, the founder of Impossible states. Lily Cole suggests that a gift-centered platform like Impossible could be one way to cope with the most recent economic crisis that our modern society experienced (Pithers, interview 2013). The impossible that the platform seeks to reach is to build a gift-centered community in which scarcity will gradually be replaced by an abundance of people’s skills, as well as the various gifts that they could offer if they had the place and the means to do it. As the name Impossible suggests, such an idea could also be called a ‘networked utopia’.
The intervention of Impossible in a highly commercialized web, together with its specific take on gifts, point at the various ways through which gifts are, and can be embedded in various social activities, while drawing attention to their role for society. Gifts have extreme unstable boundaries that make them difficult to define and mainly because of this, they represent a puzzling subject for anthropologists, sociologists, economists and media scholars. One of the main characteristics of the gift is the nature of relationships that it creates. The stronger relational capacity of gift economies is extremely relevant in the context of the commercial web, as well as in the current society that conditions individuals to think in terms of profits and money. In the same logic that almost everything can be converted into money, with the rise of various early networks and online platforms almost everything could have been converted into gifts, while the focus was being laid on mostly anonymously given gifts such as knowledge, skills, guidance, information, entertainment, etc. With the advent of social media, the shape and function of
1 Impossible.com
2 Accessed 23 April 2015 3 twitter.com
gifts changes even more as products can be at the same time gifts and commodities, while people participate in various gift exchanges using their real identities. There are various papers written on the working principles of social media and how this is “refiguring forms of economic activity, reshaping our institutions, and transforming our social and organizational practices” (Rayner, 2012). Social media offers various possibilities to establish and maintain relationships, while users engage in these platforms according to their interests. Moreover, these social platforms encourage all kinds of sharing and giving practices such as liking, tweeting, retweeting, faving, following, subscribing, etc.
I argue that all these forms of online gifting created the conditions for a new generation of giving platforms to emerge. The characteristics of online gifts and gift economies represent a core subject to this paper that seeks to answer to the research question “How is the emerging generation of gift economies combining the traditional and the established online forms of gift economies, together with other forms of online economies?” Regarding the fact that an influential part of the literature around gift economies tends to oppose gift and market economies, as well as primitive and early online gift cultures, this question becomes highly relevant to pose.
In order to gain a better insight about this (apparent) opposition, one needs to look into the entangled relations between gift and market economies, as well as to explore the different stages in which gifts have come to matter in online cultures. By analyzing this merge, I am also placing my research in the broader debate about the Internet seen on the one side as a gift economy (Raymond, 2000; Barbrook, 1998; Crawford, 2001; Ghosh, 1998; Kollock, 1999; Offer, 1997) and on the other side as a highly commercialized realm (Terranova, 2000; Fuchs, 2012, Pasquinelli, 2009; Dean 2012; Langlois, 2009; Miconi 2013).
In order to answer the research question, I will combine a historical with a case based approach and I will organize the arguments in the following order:
The first chapter will discuss primitive gifts cultures and their moral economy. Before going into detail about how these tribes organized their gift economy, the concept of the gift will be defined and characterized, making use of the theoretical dichotomy between gift exchange and market exchange.
The second chapter discusses the emergence of various forms of early online gift cultures between 1960 and 2001, while analyzing their accompanying economic model, such as the knowledge economy, together with the hit and the link economy. Further on, online gift cultures will be contrasted to primitive gift culture in order to grasp the fundamental changes that technology brought into various processes of gifting.
The third chapter discusses the advent of the social web together with analyzing social media gifts and their corresponding like economy. Firstly, the features of the social web are highlighted, together with the advent and importance of the online profile. Secondly, various examples of social gifts are provided in order to grasp their specificity and relation to market exchange.
The fourth chapter engages in more detail with a specific case study, firstly by providing a front end analysis of Impossible and discussing the characteristics of emerged relationships and secondly, by analyzing some aspects of its back end logic together with the network power that the platform creates. Lastly, three other gift-centered platforms are analyzed- ServiceSpace, KindSpring and Freecycle- in order to support and enlarge the findings of the main case study.
This paper concludes that the emerging online forms of gift economies need various kinds of additional economies in order to sustain themselves, economies that not only influence and shape the meaning and embodiment of gifts, but also intensify and enrich the emerged gift cultures. The novelty of their approach lies in how these platforms aim at implementing various kinds of small or complex acts of kindness as internal currencies, which users can redeem in real market exchange.
Chapter 1: Tribal gifts and the moral economy
The concept of gift economy represents a core subject in anthropology and sociology. This extremely complex construct brings together two other divergent concepts, namely gift and economy, while opposing or, -as I will demonstrate in this paper-, aligning the concept of monetary exchange. The concept first arose when anthropologists such as Mauss and Malinowski have studied the gift giving practices of indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States; Malinowski published his findings in 1922 with his work “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” followed by Mauss in 1925 with his essay “The Gift”.The two anthropologists started a debate on the nature and practices of the so-called tribal gift cultures, where the exchange of gifts was playing a prominent role in sustaining the wealth and prestige of different tribes. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate how the opposition between gift exchange and market exchange is reflected in various theoretical discourses, in order to highlight the specificity and characteristics of gift cultures and economies; the practices of tribal gift cultures that I will describe in this section play a crucial role in understanding how the concept of gift economy takes different shapes according to different moments in history.
The concepts of gifts and commodities, regarded as distinct forms of circulation, with each having its own delimited space, rules and logic and mostly studied as independent of each other, represent the theoretical pillars of economic sociology and anthropology (Bird-David). According to Rus, distinct authors involved in the discourse of gift economy can be grouped in three categories, namely: "1. authors who maintain a strict mutual exclusiveness of gift and commodity (Mauss, Malinowski, Graeber, Testart, Appadurai, Strathern); 2. authors who claim that gift exchange is in reality just a form of commodity exchange; the economistic model (Kirchgässner); 3. authors who
consider gifts and commodities as two poles of the same continuum, while individual transactions may fall anywhere between these two extremes" (Rus, Komter, Parry, Kollok, Carrier, Gell, Gerrard ). This paper belongs to the third group, as it will depict how these two forms of exchange not only coexist in the same society but also continuously interact with each other in ways in which the distinction between gift and commodity becomes extremely difficult to be made.
This chapter will address the following questions: What different accounts of gifts exist and where does their specificity lie? What can be
regarded to be a gift economy in archaic societies? What are the characteristics of gift and market based cultures? In order to answer these questions, I will first try to define gifts and gift economies, by analysing the dichotomy between ideological models of gift and commodity exchange together with the critic brought to this dichotomous model. Second, I will provide an overview of the tribal gift cultures and their economy based on gift exchange, barter and strong moral obligations. This chapter offers a description of the process of gift giving in the physical world, as we will see in the next chapters that the online world offers a new perspective on the meaning and practices of gift cultures and economies.
1.1 The notion of the gift and the gift economy
Gifts are not clearly defined and have purposes that are extremely divergent, fact that explains the considerable amount of discussions drawn on their nature. The concepts gift and gift economy are complex mainly because the meaning of the gift can vary and can fulfil many social functions. What is extremely
important is that gifts are not simply given, but that all kinds of existent and emergent gift economies have unwritten, general accepted rules, norms and practices that guide processes of gift giving and characterize the sort of
relationships that get created. By depicting different perspectives on gifts, from different historical moments, the centrality and importance of gift-giving
practices will be highlighted.
A gift is, according to the dictionary, "a thing given willingly to someone without payment; a present" (Oxford Dictionaries). It can be argued that this official definition of gifts tends to have some kind of material value attached, as the word 'thing' is present. Equally important is the fact that 'present' and 'gift' are regarded as one and the same. It can be argued that presents are mainly commodities transformed into gifts, while gifts in general can take various forms, tangible or intangible. More about this crucial
distinction will follow further on.
Another definition explains gifts as "something given voluntarily" (dictionary.com2). I find this definition as being more accurate by using the word 'something', as I will argue that gifts are becoming more and more immaterial goods. I disagree though with the use of the word 'voluntarily', as I will demonstrate that gifts have various kinds of obligations attached, such as strong moral and social obligations in the tribal gift economies or 'small' private obligations in modern societies characterized by market exchange. For both cases, these obligations have various implications for processes of gift giving.
This definition adopted by the MAUSS group in which “to give a gift is to transfer something without any immediate return, or guarantee that there will ever be one”, (Graeber, 2001) pays less attention to concepts like reciprocity or
prestige, which can be seen as immediate forms of reward, being crucial for
gift-giving practices.
Relying on these definitions, it becomes clear that the way of understanding the concept of the gift and gift economy is to oppose it to market
economy. It appears that there is "a natural antinomy between the fact of giving
and that of exchanging" (Testart 2). As Testart argues, "to exchange is always to let someone have something against a corresponding return, to give can never consist in yielding one thing against another" (2). Therefore, it can be argued that one of the specificities of gifts is the distinction between a gift and
an exchange.
Another important thing to consider when defining gifts is that "there is nothing inherent in the gift that makes it morally good or bad" (Komter 104). Normally, when thinking about gifts, concepts like love, friendship, family, generosity, kindness or respect is among the first to come to ones mind. In everyday activity, various kinds of gifts have the ability to make people happy, fulfil desires, surprise, offer new possibilities and new relationships, or provide help and support. But one should not forget that "gifts can be used for less noble purposes such as to manipulate, flatter, bribe, deceive, humiliate, dominate, offend, hurt" (Komter 94). The world of corruption and crime is also used to practices of gift giving. As Komter argues, "although one of the primary functions of the gift is to create and maintain social ties, gifts can also undermine and even annihilate human bonds” (94) or even kill, like in the case of a poisoned cup. She further notices the double meaning of the German and Dutch word "Gift", which also means poison. This perspective highlights once more the complexity of gifts and shows that the ideological models that I will describe below are almost never encountered in real world practices.
Ideological forms of gift and market exchange
As argued by Rus, "there is some unspoken notion, that giving a gift is mostly an altruistic act" (56). Moreover, the ideology of gift economies "brings to mind a romantic image of a highly integrated and cooperative society" in which people give just for the sake of giving (Rus 100). According to Parry, "the notion of ‘pure gifts’ is mere ideological obfuscation, masking the supposedly non-ideological verity that nobody does anything for nothing” (455). To simplify the idea of gift exchange is to state that somebody gives something (of its own) to somebody else and "the item or service is simply given and that is that" (Laidlaw 621).
On the opposite side of gift exchange there is the exchange of commodities, where "exchange takes place between independent, calculating,
transactors" (Carrier 138). In their pure and abstract forms, people involved in commodity transactions are self-interested and have no links or obligations to the people with whom they exchange. The concept of rationality plays a crucial role in neoclassical economics. With their simplified model of market exchange, called 'Homo economics', economists conceptualize all human behaviour as involving participants that are "calculated, rational and unemotional maximisers who always tend to optimize their actions" (Kirchgässner 59). Moreover, economists try to explain generosity as something calculative, which usually incorporates selfish motives.
Before going further with analyzing how this distinction between gift and monetary exchange was and is made in tribal, modern and online gift cultures, one important aspect should be made clear and that is that "gift exchange and commodity transactions are ideal types and any economy will be a mix of these two types of exchange as well as many intermediate cases between them" (Kollok 6). Furthermore, critic brought to this dichotomous model will be presented in order to demonstrate the importance of regarding any kind of economy as a more elaborate social fabric of gift and market exchange than the majority of existent research presents.
The gift - market dichotomy
As argued before, in order to describe the nature and characteristics of gift exchange, many scholars make use of this opposition between gift and market exchange. One extreme way to express this dichotomy is to say that gift economies build communities (Bollier), while the market "serves as an acid on those relationships" (Parry and Bloch). Mauss also clearly distinguished between gift and commodity exchange, while Appadurai describes gift and market exchange as ‘fundamentally contrastive and mutually exclusive’ (11). Amongst the most relevant differences is the opposition in the types of relationships that get created in both forms of exchange. Gregory, another influential theorist of gift economies, proposes five sharp criteria to distinguish
gift from monetary exchange, from which three have to do with this distinction in building relationships, namely: independent actors vs. dependent actors, quantitative relationship vs. qualitative relationship and relationships between objects vs. relationships between people.
The first criterion stresses the fact that while the monetary societies are described as having no (strong) social bonds (Eisenstein), as transactions are made mostly between calculative, independent strangers, the small tribal gift cultures are characterized by gift exchange that is embedded in and constructive of various kinds of social relationships. These relationships are animated by strong moral obligations, resulting in dependent actors, who give and receive following various reciprocal patterns, norms and rules, as I will further debate. Because participants in a gift exchange can be regarded as reciprocally dependent (Gregory 41), they create ‘qualitative relationships’ while commodity exchange creates ‘quantitative relationships’, through which exchange parties remain independent after the direct exchange gets quantified, this representing the second criterion. The third criterion is described by Strathern who argues that commodity exchange is "a price-forming process, a system of purchase and sale", which creates relationships between the objects transacted, while in the process of gift giving, the transactors aim at "the personal relationship that the exchange of gifts creates, and not the things themselves" (Strathern 19).
The remaining two criteria are immediate exchange vs. delayed exchange and alienable goods vs. inalienable goods. Regarding the distinction between immediate and delayed exchange it can be argue that it is valid only to some extent. When engaged in market exchange, we mostly give money in exchange for particular goods; therefore we can call it an immediate exchange. But there are various other ways in which the market exchange involves a delayed exchange, in the form of investing money in a company, speculating on the burse, etc. When one gives a gift, as opposed to exchanging a gift, one does not necessarily expect a gift in return at the same moment of time, or in the future. But this does not mean that we cannot speak of a direct exchange
when a gift is given; by giving a gift, the giver not only feels good about his or hers gesture, but he or she also gains social reputation. As argued above, prestige was an important factor for primitive gift cultures and remains one in online gift cultures as well. Online, the ‘reputation game’ -in which people give in the expectation of an immediate reward in the form of gaining social status or fame- plays a key role. Prestige can be regarded as a primordial form of wealth – “a wealth that is measured in terms of social standing and the promise of receiving gifts in return” (Rayner 2012). The same goes for the distinction between alienable and inalienable goods. According to Godelier, “the social is not just the sum of alienable and inalienable goods, but is brought into existence by the difference and inter-dependence of these two spheres of exchange. Maintaining society thus requires not “keeping-while-giving, but keeping-for-giving and giving-for-keeping” (cited in Rus).
Several scholars (Appadurai 1986; Parry 1986; Carrier 1990; Gell 1992; Parry and Bloch 1993) argue that this opposition is unjustified and should be discarded. As described above, this dichotomy is based on” Western ethnocentric premises” (Rus 16), which mostly seek to romanticize the gift exchange of primitive gift cultures and the idea of a ‘pure gift’. According to Gell, it all reduces to the simple formula of "gift-reciprocity-Good / market-exchange-Bad” (142).
Many scholars argue that the pure model of gift exchange is based on "logical elegance instead of on empirical data "(Gerrard 52) and does not take into account "social relations, technology, or institutions, nor basic sociological concerns like norms, power, and social networks" (Lie 343). In addition, behavioral economists have proven that many (economic) decisions and transactions are often irrational and emotionally driven, and "include psychological items like social appreciation, emotional fulfillment, efforts to avert fear and guilt, etc" (Rus 52). It is argued that "the very existence of gifts has always posed a problem, because the model that describes human behavior as based purely on self-interest, can hardly explain unilateral acts of giving
things away without getting something in return " (Rus 57). In order to fully understand the early and the new emerging forms of gift economies, it is crucial to leave aside this dichotomy and to demonstrate how the meanings and forms of gifts and commodities are continuously changing, and to analyse how and where these spheres interact and reject each other. There are various ways in which a commodity can be transformed in a gift and a gift can take on the characteristics of a commodity, while objects can simultaneously play roles as both gifts and commodities.
An important distinction that does apply for both forms of exchange is the matter of scarcity versus abundance. It can be argued that the monetary system, characterized by the exchange of commodities, encourages hoarding and the accumulation of material wealth (Eisenstein) whereas gift economies are based on generosity and reciprocity and encourages the accumulation of
social wealth. If both forms of exchange are competitive, as I will try to
demonstrate, the competition in primitive gift cultures is about who gives the most, instead of who accumulates the most. According to Eisenstein, the wealth of primitive gift cultures is characterized by how much friends one has, instead of how much stuffs one has, like the case of market societies. Moreover, Eisenstein argues that one of the features of a gift culture is that if someone has more than he or she needs, instead of keeping it and accumulating even more, he or she will give the excess away. And this is done not out of generosity, but because it is from the act of giving that “security, status, everything that we call wealth comes from” (Eisenstein 78). We can speak here about gifts given out of utility and not generosity, which brings the gift exchange closer to the market exchange, but the sharp distinction between the idea of scarcity and that of abundance, remains one of the most important and most challenging to address.
In general, and especially in the new emerging forms of online gift economies, the gift becomes almost inseparable from the commodity, as I will show in the next two chapters. But also in primitive cultures studied by Mauss, as we will see in the section that follows, scholars argued that gift exchange
"involved economic calculations to a larger extent than was generally assumed" (Rus 90).
1.2 Traditional gift cultures and their corresponding moral
economy
Malinowski and Mauss were the first anthropologists to do research into gift economies (Rus). The dialogue between them distinguished different forms of gift exchange that already pointed at the complexity of gifting. With the help of tribal exchange forms such as the Potlatch and the Kula Ring, I will describe the characteristics of the early gift economies.
The Potlatch
In The Gift, Marcel Mauss describes the indigenous gift economies practiced by people of the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada, with the main group Kwakiutl. These tribes were holding Potlatches at various important social events such as birth, marriage, death, or to celebrate a new social position. In these Potlatches, chiefs of tribes would gather their clans together and would offer them various gifts, while at the same time competing for prestige and status. The size of gifts and of the Potlatch itself reflected and maintained the social status and prestige of the host, with the rule that the highest status went to the one who offered the most. The objects given, such as food, blankets, furs, weapons, canoes, or various crafts (Rayner 2013) were not of significant value; the focus was not laid on the objects offered, but rather the gesture of giving had symbolical, social and economical meaning.
As Mauss observed, the motivational logic of hosting a Potlatch was that “the man who gives recklessly is the man who wins prestige’. It might seem that giving in order to protect or gain social status is a highly self-interested gesture, but, as Graeber argues, “giving is simultaneously an act of personal and communal affirmation” (67). Although status gets established
during a Potlatch, the gift itself is directed to the tribe, having a “social benefit, strengthening kinship bonds and ensuring the welfare of the community” (Rayner 2013). Accumulating wealth was not strange of these primitive gift economies, but, according to Mauss, the rich were considered “the treasurers of their communities” and where expected to redistribute and redirect the accumulated wealth back to the tribe. Accordingly, gift-giving practices were assuring the distribution of goods and services across members of the tribe that had a kind of kin relation to each other. The kinship character of relationships is of extreme importance, as it was this kinship network that was able to secure the economic circulation (Rus 155) and that created a system of relationships based on mutual trust and respect. As opposed to the market societies in which the exchange is mostly done between strangers, in tribal gift economies kinship bonds created unwritten, strong moral obligations and it can be argued that these bonds were the currency of these gift economies. Although no account was held on who needs to keep the next Potlatch, the practice itself and the small community induced a sense of obligation to continue the exchange. Another reason for this continuity is the competitive nature of the Potlatch, influenced by the ranked aristocratic kin groups of primitive cultures (Schrauwers). Anthropologists argue that "gift-givers seek to out-give their competitors so as to capture important political, kinship and religious roles" (Graeber).
Because gift-giving practices were embedded in different kinds of social institutions and were regulating different aspects of life, Mauss characterized the Potlatch as a "total prestation". According to Parry, gift giving fulfilled a variety of functions, such as "economic, kinship, religious and political functions that could not be clearly distinguished from each other, and which mutually influenced the nature of the practice". According to Camerer, the most important function of the Potlatch was to "clarify social roles, wealth, or status" (181) and Lévi-Strauss, argues that exchanged gifts function as instruments for influence, power, sympathy, status and emotion (Lévi-Strauss 19). Moreover, the Potlatch could also be used as a tool of war,
its purpose being to engage the rival “in an exchange that they could not possibly hope to compete in” (Rayner, 2013). This competition resembles in various ways to the working principles of market societies.
The last thing worth mentioning about the gift exchange of primitive gift cultures has to do with the matter of abundance versus scarcity. It is argued that these cultures were surrounded by a rich physical environment, that had more than enough food:” salmon ran so thick that the rivers seemed black with fish, and there were endless supplies of berries, roots, seals and other aquatic mammals” (Graeber 45). Having this abundant surroundings and the possibility to store food, surplus was created which was “capable of supporting a class of non-producers” (Graeber 168), in the sense that the indigenous people could sustain their tribes without the need of practicing agriculture or searching for other ways to produce food. This condition was favorable for gift giving practices, which, in return, were sustaining the condition of abundance.
The Kula ring
Between 1914 and 1918, the Polish anthropologist Malinowski conducted research on the Trobriand Islands in the Solomon Sea. In his influential essay, he describes the practices of the islanders who were engaging in a ceremonial gift exchange, namely the Kula ring. This ritual involved that members of the tribe would travel from one archipelago to another, putting their lives in danger just to be able to hand in the gift (Malinowski). While it seems to be a quite risky practice, to participate in the Kula ring was seen as a privilege and was designated with political authority. The ritual consists in circulating red shell-disc necklaces in a clockwise direction and white shell armbands in the opposite way until the process completed a full circle of the islands from the archipelago (Rayner, 2013).
As seen with the Potlatch, here the exchanged objects are trivial as well, without significant value; it is the ritual and tradition of the gift exchange that animates the Kula ring. But while in the Potlatch the size of gifts was highly
important, in the Kula ring the size does not matter, the accent being laid on the process of exchanging gifts following a precise ritual and on the so-called ‘spirit of the gift’. An important function of this primitive gift exchanges was that it involved processes of identity-formation. Through gifts, people were able to show not only their status and authority, but also their identity or their intentions. For most of them, the only way to regain their lost status was to hold a Potlatch, through which they regained their identity by getting back their names or titles. Graeber states that “a kula shell is like a fragment of individual identity that has, as it were, broken off” (166); the gift is seen as a part of the giver or receiver. Camerer argues that gifts are not simply given, but "are symbolic of some qualities of gift givers or receivers; gifts are actions people take that convey meaning" (182)". Through these rituals of gift-giving, authority, identity, relationships and group boundaries could be defined, while ensuring the distribution of wealth.
Reciprocity and moral obligation
Reciprocity is a key element for primitive gift cultures and, according to Mauss, accepting a gift implies an unwritten, but clear solemn obligation to reciprocate. Mauss regarded this obligation as a social contract ruled by three main obligations: "the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to repay" (Mauss cited in Rus). Moreover, Mauss stated that failure to return a gift mostly leads to ending the relationship, claim that is highly disputed. Testart made an important distinction between the obligation to reciprocate and the obligation to fulfil it; it can be argued that in the Potlatch, the strong moral obligations were dictated by the social sanction imposed by the whole society, but this sanction was neither legal nor punishable (Testart), in the sense that no account was being held on who gives what in return to whom. With other words, the reciprocity was not forced by a legal sanction such as punishment, but was assured by the network of kin relationships, guided by strong moral obligations.
This moral norm of reciprocity is typical for these societies, also according to Malinowski who argued that the societies practicing the Kula ring are “arranged into well-balanced chains of reciprocal services” (46). The functioning logic of this kind of reciprocity is that a giver will give in the expectation of a return and a counter gift will be made "motivated by a fear that the partner will cease to give if not properly reciprocated "(Malinowski 26). Because the gift giving relationships were mostly formed by close bonds between members of the tribe or between tribes themselves, such a tension of giving and receiving can last for the whole period of someone’s life. Such giving practices create what Bourdieu calls a “relational space between the giver and the receiver, which can be later manipulated by both sides to achieve practical or symbolic ends” (Bird-David 311).
The moral norm of reciprocity can simply be defined as, "if you want to be helped by others you must help them” (Rus 173). Gift exchange not only maintains these non-market societies, but also creates or tears down social relationships. In these non-market societies, where there was no clear institutionalized economic exchange system, this moral norm of reciprocity and the exchange of various kinds of goods was supporting "the collective interest of all members "(Komter 101, 104) and was providing "insurance or credit, substituting for exchange in formal, anonymous markets" (Camerer 181).
Another perspective is that of Graeber, who considers that the most striking thing about the practices of Kwakiutl people is the little role that reciprocity plays. He argues that gift exchange in tribal cultures didn’t actually involved much of any obligation to reciprocate. He sustains this argument by explaining that the kind of relationships that get created by gift economies, namely the ‘total prestations’ that Mauss speaks about, are “permanent relationships between individuals and groups, relations that were permanent precisely because there was no way to cancel them out by a repayment”. He rather speaks about ‘balanced reciprocity’, which includes “both classical gift exchange and the less cutthroat forms of trade or barter” (Graber 219). In this sense, the concept of reciprocity as described by anthropologists looses its
strength and without the concept of reciprocity, the gift exchange becomes more similar to market exchange than expected.
The market economy of primitive gift cultures
The native people involved in the above-described practices of gift economies had, besides elaborate Potlatches, also trade and barter as early stages of economy. Trade, the same as gift exchange, was done between the Kwakiutl nations, as well as surrounding aboriginal nations (Hawthorn). The strong, long-term social relationships that characterized these early gift economies influenced and constructed also the trade and commodity economies. Before becoming impersonal, short-term market relations that the current society knows, the exchange of commodities and the trade involved face-to-face encounters, without commercial intermediaries, between local producers and consumers, which could have been either relatives or friends engaged in long-lasting relationships (Carrier 63). It is also important to mention that the concept of property in these primitive societies was highly developed and important to daily life (Hawthorn) and more relevant, “played a crucial role in the constitution of social identity” (Graeber 195) and in the creation of relationships.
Similar to the myths of pure gifts and pure commodities, there circulates also the myth of 'the originally bartering society', which claims that barter was the beginning of monetary exchange (Graeber). This economist perspective represents another romantic view of an imaginary past. As anthropologists demonstrated with the study of the primitive gift cultures, most objects moved back and forth in the form of gifts. According to Rus, gift exchange represents an "intermediate stage in the evolution of exchange forms" (67) and Mauss claims that “gift-giving was the primary form of exchange, of which barter and currency-exchange are secondary ” (Davis, 2006), in the sense that although during a Potlatch people could also barter goods, the process of giving was seen as the primary source of sustaining the tribes.
Therefore, it can be argued that not barter, but gift exchange was the seed of future forms of (market) exchange.
To conclude, it was demonstrated that the dichotomous model of gift and market exchange is not always justified when analysing primitive gift cultures. One should avoid regarding the beginnings of treating usury as a break in the chain of gift giving (Hénaff) and should pay more attention to the intricate relationship between gift and market exchange. The next chapter discusses how this intricate relationship between gift and commodity is present and accentuated in the online world.
Chapter 2: Online gifts and the knowledge economy
In the previous chapter, I have explored the specificity of gift exchange, together with the norms and forms of exchange in tribal gift cultures. It was also discussed how the theoretical opposition between gift and market exchange was not fully adequate when analysing how the two forms of exchange were actually practiced in the physical world of primitive gift cultures. This chapter will show that the online world engaged with the concept of gift economy in very similar ways to the offline world. In the early thinking of the internet, the same dichotomous model between gift and market exchange was maintained both by users as by theorists. There is an on-going theoretical debate about the internet seen on the one side as a gift economy and on the other side as a highly commercial realm. Here again the dichotomous model will be presented, together with critic brought to regarding the emerging online cultures in the lens of two mutually exclusive forms of exchange. It can be argued that it has become almost impossible to analyse processes of (online) gift giving without taking into account the economic layer that goes beyond social action.The main questions that this chapter seeks to answer are: What is the connection between the tribal gift culture and the early online sharing culture? How were the gift-giving practices influential for the early thinking of the internet and for the web as a whole, and what was the background of this development? What are considered to be online gifts and how do they differ from tribal gifts? In order to answer these questions, I will first describe the socio-cultural background as well as the techno-economical development of the emergence of the gift economy on the early net. By doing this, the ideals and values of early Internet thinking will be highlighted. Secondly, I will identify what can be regarded as online gifts and how the logic of giving takes on new shapes in online communities. Third and finally, I will contrast the two
forms of gift cultures- the primitive gift cultures and the first forms of online gift cultures- in order to characterize the fundamental changes that took place in the process of online gift giving.
2.1 The emergence of the gift economy on the early internet
The New Left and the Sixties
Barbrook offers a good insight in the early thinking and the big ideals of the so-called Internet Natives. This insight shows how this early thinking is constructed and influenced by the same dichotomous model of gifts and commodities discussed in previous chapter. This description of early internet ideals and practices is relevant because the norms and practices of these early virtual communities form the foundation for both emerging sharing cultures and their corresponding model of knowledge economy, as well as for various forms of gift cultures and their corresponding model of gift economy.
The sixties represent a historical moment that I will take as a starting point in trying to describe the emergence of early online gift economies. As Eisenstein argues, it is in the sixties when the mentality swift began and people became to be concerned about how to give back to earth instead of how to take from earth. According to Barbrook, a movement called the New Left created in the sixties a new form of radical politics, called anarcho- communist. Among the main values promoted by New Left were individual freedom and cultural dissent. Important to notice is the fact that their ideals laid the focus not on the people, but on the medium and its ''almost magical powers' (Barbrook 1998) to bring people together and help them achieve their goals. Ideally, the new medium would offer a space in which the emerging technical possibilities of creating networks would help nourish new ways of communication and organization. In this new organizational forms, people could engage in gift giving processes, in a similar way to those from the past.
had been prefigured in the tribal past" (1998) and that the internet was able to recreate that former space of free market. In its pure and abstract vision, this movement believed that "the tribal gift economy demonstrated that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market” (1998). Accordingly, gift exchange was seen to be the absolute antithesis of market competition. Their utopian vision pictured a future in which the gift has won 'the battle' with the commodity and the only form of organizing labour and societies would be through the free exchange of gifts. This way of thinking about the internet seen as a form of gift economy, influenced not only the people that first came into contact with the new medium, but also the infrastructure of the medium itself, which offered ways through which people could freely interact and share. When these first Netizens (Barbrook), namely ordinary users, started to engage with the internet, they realized that they can use it as a tool of organization and as a medium for democratic and interactive communication (Rosenzweig 145). The first virtual communities (Rheingold) appeared, organized in a bottom-up manner, which can be regarded as the first forms of social networks in which people interacted with each other just to communicate or to gather around specific interests and share experience (Hof). The interaction was made possible through various means, such as message boards, chat rooms, social networking sites, or virtual worlds (Hof 1997).
But how did the ideals of the sixties concretize themselves in the early emerging virtual communities? Which where the platforms that offered space for engagement in gift giving processes and what was exactly given? In this section, I will provide a brief description of the members and practices of these early virtual communities developed before the advent of the web in 1990.
The concept of community
As seen in the previous chapter with the notion of the gift, the notion of community is also a very complex concept, with disparate uses that are highly related to practices of gift giving. Similar to the main perception associated
with the concept of gift, the concept of community has mostly connotations of "affection, solidarity, interdependence, mutual aid, and consensus" and expresses "our capacity to join one another, share our efforts or sympathize" (Brunton 8). Accordingly, we are almost never using the word ‘community’ in a negative way, also because it "carries significant emotional baggage" (Kendall 36).
Community forming was a central focus for early computer scientists, as concepts like 'communal computing' - "a system around which a fellowship could form" and 'communities of practice' - "an area for theorizing learning and, later, knowledge management" (Brunton 6) were leading them in building a network that could release and expand the immanent human capital. Community forming plays a crucial role also for the development of a gift culture, as practices of giving are embedded in and dependent on norms and rules set by the various communities. It can be argued that gift giving would have almost no significance if not practices inside a community, ideally formed by strong bonds between its members who, by giving gifts and engaging with the community, can perform, develop and consolidate their identities, social status and general wealth.
The early virtual communities can be described as "social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (Maltz 14). The participants of these online communities- which had semi anarchist roots-, were able to enforce standards and values of their own into the networks. As Brunton argues, “the 'customary law'—our standards, the laws that develop among 'the members of the tribe or community'—keeps 'cordial relations' operating smoothly and functioning best without outside intervention of any kind" (45). In the same way that tribal gift economies could sustain themselves independently, the emerging communities were concerned to find organizational forms outside of the established capitalist model, ruled by proprietary laws. This is another crucial aspect for the development of future gift cultures in which individuals
are steered to share and give rather than buy or sell. According to Rheingold, 'community' and webs of personal relationships were the shell of the internet and of the emerging gift cultures. The expansion of human capital and of these 'webs of personal relationships' that engaged in practices of gift giving began in various early networks and chat rooms as I will describe below.
Early sharing networks, communities and online gifts
Already in the sixties, the universities were making use of time-sharing
operating systems, such as ACP, DTSS, CTSS or Berkeley Timesharing
System. Through these early systems, the potential of networked computers to stimulate the formation of communities and of gift economies became a certainty. There where also proprietary networks such as DECNET, which point at the early commercial side of the internet and its differentiation between two forms of functionality: open source and proprietary software.
ARPANET
The 'network of networks' (Brunton), called ARPANET and released in 1969, was among one of the most influential networks of its time.
Before becoming the boundless global network that we know today, the internet could have been regarded as a small town or as a "social clean room", extremely 'local', speaking in a relative way (Brunton). As Brunton argues, this small town, called ARPANET, was "populated almost exclusively with very smart townspeople” (16) and like in the primitive tribes, this group of intelligent peers was based on mutual trust and respect, which was also reflected in the systems they build. This small group of smart people can also be considered neighbours as well as colleagues, because they were originating from two departments- the academia and the military- and had a shared experience of collectivity and cooperation as well as of "sharing a sense of etiquette and appropriate behaviour, both on the network and among themselves" (Brunton 23). According to Brunton, 'trust' was the key word in
the early emerging networks and online cultures, as "these cultures are deeply devoted to techniques of internal interoperation" (35). These elements of trust and reciprocity play a crucial role both in primitive as in early emerging online gift cultures and were also built into the architecture of the early internet. In order to successfully build a community, trust is needed, and in order to built a successfully gift economy, a community build on mutual trust and respect is needed. It is precisely because of this ‘small village’ based on mutual trust that practises of giving and sharing became the guiding logic in the online world.
BBSes
In the late seventies, the ‘small online town’ was dispersed as Bulletin Board
Systems (BBSes) became available to a wider public. These early systems that
can be regarded as the precursors of the web and social networks (Brunton) engaged ordinary users in a multitude of activities, such as uploading and downloading information and software, reading news and bulletins, playing online games, discussing in various chat rooms, and even leaving messages on a user’s profile. It can be argued that through this system, ordinary people could engage for the first time with practices of online gift giving, by offering help and support to each other, upload and download large amounts of information and also aggregate in various chat rooms and private conversations based on common interests (still most of the main topics on these BBSes systems were technical, discussing software and hardware and resembling ARPANET). Accordingly, each system had a dedicated user community, responsible for organizing the flow of these early networks. BBSes were places where people could experiment the new online space and show their skills and talents, form their online and offline identity and earn status and recognition inside the community, highly similar to the role that the Potlatch had for tribal gift cultures. By engaging in these activities, users also gave important amounts of time to the community, which, as I will also argue with the examples that will follow, could be regarded as a valuable gift.
USENET
Another influential example of early networks is the open-ended discussion system Usenet, considered the ‘ARPANET of outsiders' (Brunton). This network was released in 1979, resembled BBSes and can be regarded as the precursor of forums and blogs. The interaction between Usenet users created a good defined set of ethics - the so-called netiquette- and gave birth to important concepts such as FAQ or spam. On Usenet, members would mainly make conversation on various topics and provide information and general and technical guidance. The time spent online together with the support and information offered and shared can be considered to be forms of gifts, even though they were not seen as such by the users.
Most important, according to the evolved netiquette of Usenet, commercial use of the net was perceived as extremely unwanted (Brunton) and by this, this early network positioned itself against the monetary system. This message of a user on Usenet as a response to the first spam message (the green card lottery spamming) describes the thinking of this early community perfectly: “NO COMMERCIAL ADVERTISING, if you please. Imagine what this vulnerable medium would look like if hundreds of thousands of merchants like you put up their free ads like yours” (April, 12, 1994). Today, 21 years after this demand, it is almost impossible to imagine how the internet would look like without commercial companies.
In the same way that gifts can be used for negative actions which are in detriment of the society, the emergence of spam on Usenet proved that the 'virtual community' can be used in - what was then interpreted as- inappropriate usage and became, for the first time, associated with commercial interests. In the same way that the appearance of merchants was argued to be a break in the chain of gift giving practices, the appearance of spam and the prominence of commercial interests that came along with it, was regarded by early virtual communities as a break in the emerging gift giving practices, characterized by
the free exchange of interests, skills and information. It can be argued that for all these early communities and networks (ARPANET, Usenet, FidoNet or The WELL), commercial interest was not part of the picture yet, even though they were developing the medium in an extremely commercialized society. It was with the advent of spam that the community realised that it truly is a community, by getting forces together to combat the intruder, by discussing what should or should not be done, should the virtual created space become regulated and if yes, by what means? Who would benefit? All these organizational aspects were extremely important in setting the milestones for a future gift giving generation, which would have strong values like sharing free information, ignoring proprietary rights, creating stuffs for each other for free and support and help each other via forums, channels, etc. This ‘free’ aspect of the early virtual communities is extremely important for the emerging of an online gift economy.
By participating in these ‘familiar’ early networks, people were gaining trust to connect, interact, collaborate and share with complete strangers. As mentioned before, the concept of trust is crucial in processes of gift giving and community formation; more importantly, building trust among strangers in something that a gift culture aims to accomplish. When people have trust in members of their community, other forms of exchange can evolve that exclude the impersonal use of money as a guarantee for the reciprocity of exchange. This open space of conversation and collaboration, made possible through computer-mediated communication, was playing a key role in forming a sustainable (online) community based on trust, common interest, shared values and self-regulated standards, factors that are of extreme importance for the emergence and development of online gift economies.
Wizards
When it comes to self-regulated standards in early virtual communities, the so-called Wizards - systems administrators- and later webmasters, play a crucial element. Wizards formed the basis of administration and engaged in various
service and maintenance tasks, such as restricting access, modifying nearly everything on the platform and in the database, making new postings, monitoring other users, offering permission for modifications, etc.
These activities that were ensuring a good functioning of the online community can be considered as valuable gifts. Wizards, similar to tribe chiefs, would offer their accumulated knowledge and skills in the form of gifts to the community as a whole in order to contribute to the general wealth. Again, this was not a conscious gift giving practice, but just the netiquette, similar to the unwritten moral obligation that was guiding primitive gift cultures. As we will see with the majority of online gifts, gifts are not just altruistically given. This kind of giving brings immediate authority to the giver and ''many pleasures, not least among them the promise of a direct correlation between knowledge and power, and the satisfaction of a pure meritocracy" (Brunton 17).
Moderators of chat rooms or newsgroups, precisely like tribe chiefs, organized themselves in various hierarchical ways in order to protect the 'well functioning' of these networks. Messages such as "I want to be operator plz!!!!!!" or "can you please give me access in %#channel%" where often posted in various chat rooms. Access to a certain channel or the status of moderator was considered to be highly valuable. In this logic, 'access' was considered to be a gift, a privilege. The name of ‘Wizard’ was a ‘title’, similar to titles of properties that were exchanged during Potlatches. Only skilled, active users, who participated and engaged the most with the online community, its netiquette and its giving practices, could obtain the title of Wizard. The more gifts, services, time and energy one would invest in the platform, the more status and reputation he or she gained inside the virtual community, which motivated users to participate and give even more.
2.2 The mixed economy of the informational web
The new possibilities envisioned by the New Left in the sixties, and which already began to take shape in the next decades as shown above, were made
truly possible only in the nineties by two crucial developments. One was of economical nature, namely the shift in the economies of production, which is characterized by both the decrease of the price of PCs, modems and internet connections, as by the decrease in costs of collaboration, communication and coordination (Brunton). The other important development is technological, and marks the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1991, with its introduced web browsers and search engines, features that shaped the online world in various ways, adding much more possibilities to the above-mentioned early forms of networks. In this section, I will briefly analyse the various economies that characterized the early informational web in order to prove the interreliance of online gift and market exchange.
The spirit of the sixties, as well as the practices of ARPANET users inspired movements from the nineties, such as the successful open source movement and the creation of Linux. The logic and practices of these open source programmers are extremely relevant as, according to Barbrook, the current Web was born and has grown through the free sharing of information, strongly encouraged by the practices of programmers (Barbrook, 2002). As described above, the members of the early virtual communities engaged in a model of gift economy based on reputation and voluntarisms and that was "driven neither by state nor by market but by forms of Benkler’s 'commons-based peer production'"(Barbrook 2002). The commons- 'commons-based peer production was achieved through the communication between various groups of peers that were collaborating and sharing information, ideas, tools and software; these practices created a so-called knowledge economy, where knowledge is regarded as an economic good, a key resource comparable with natural resources. The key component of a knowledge economy is its reliance on human capital and its structure aims to effectively utilize assets such as knowledge, intellectual capabilities or skills (Powel and Snellman). Seeing that in the netiquette of these early virtual communities ownerships was not part of the picture, users were encourage to give and take unconditionally, while multiplying and reshaping their gifts. The netiquette was reflected also in the
technological layer of the Internet, where one could not speak of copyright, as the communication between computers is only possible through copying material from one computer to another. Therefore, the structure of the web "assumes that intellectual property is technically and socially obsolete" and that the emerging online gift economies "welcome technologies which improve the availability of data" (Barbrook 1998). This knowledge economy was interconnected with an emerging gift economy in which users began to participate in various practices of gift giving, mostly by giving gifts in the form of information and guidance.
But as opposed to the beliefs and expectations of the New Left, in the informational web the gift did not replace the commodity. In what follows, I will show how the internet has not become neither a total gift economy, nor a total market economy, but a mixed economy, where the free and the fee were constantly interacting with each other and where users are getting for free what they used to pay for and pay for what they used to get for free (Barbrook 2003).
The hit and link economy
On top of the existing knowledge and gift economy, other two economies emerged, namely the hit and later the ‘link’ economy (Rogers). These monetary driven economies were dependent on the above-explained forms of sharing and giving in order to gain profit. It can be argue that the other side of a high tech gift economy (Barbrook) is a speculative – driven market boom known as the dot.com bubble (Galbraith and Hale 2004).
The "read-only web” (Berners-Lee) offered limited interaction between the users and the so-called 'personal' websites. The users could search and read information, but could not comment or share content. During this period, users could mainly search and read information acting as 'consumers' of information (Cormode) while content creators were few. Although the information was freely provided and could be considered a gift, the users where not only
transformed in 'consumers' but also in 'products'. Manny websites were applying a freemium model through which they offered the product or service for free, but they charged additional fees for ‘premium’ features, functionality or other virtual goods. Moreover, it is argued that in order to get for free what they have previously paid for (for example information), the participation, attention and giving practices of users were being exploited for commercial purposes (Terranova).
Commercial companies made use of the knowledge economy and of the searching and linking practices of the users by transforming them into products through the logic of the so-called ‘hit and link economy’ (Rogers). The consumers, visitors of various websites, were transformed into valuable 'hits', which represented the first form to measure user engagement and web traffic (D’Alessio). The commercial logic was simple: the more one would engage with a certain website, the most attractive it would become for hosting advertisements (Gerlitz and Helmond). With the advent of Google PageRank algorithm this logic of hits changed into a logic of links and became the 'link economy' (Wesh). According to Gerlitz and Helmond, the link became the main currency and the measure for ranking websites and all the freely produced, shared or given online content was organized around this logic of obtaining as many hits and links as possible.
These two types of digital born economies demonstrate how profit was made out of the free informational exchange characteristic for the knowledge economy and how practices of gift giving could serve both commercial as non-commercial interests. Moreover, these economies brought another spirit of competition among the new created websites, forums or blogs, which can be argued that animated and intensified not only the practices of dot.com bubble, but also the practices of online sharing and giving various information, services or objects. I strongly agree with the claim of Barbrook that "the dotcom commodity economy and the hi-tech gift economy are – at one and the same time – in opposition and in symbiosis with each other" and I argue that online, the same information can serve as both a gift and a commodity. A website can
