QotW4: Sharing is Caring 'e Gift'

“It's free, it's out here, but you're going to have to dig for it. You are going to have to give something away in order to receive something back. You have to participate for it to be real: a gift economy.” (Ed Phillips 1997)

The internet has been reborn and revamped into a sharing and caring community of users that are connected from around the world. This community or economy is called the gift economy, where sometimes it is better to give than to receive. A gift economy is an economic system in which the prevalent mode of exchange is for goods and services to be given without explicit agreement. However, the gift differs fundamentally from the quid pro quo of a market exchange. A market exchange is measured in the sense that the terms of trade are clearly specified and the trade happens in one instance. The good to be exchanged is priced and changes hand in exchange for a certain amount of money or an IOU.
An example of a gift economy would be a car enthusiast website. Specific individuals who own similar car models and interested in tuning their cars would register at a specific website. The one I would be using today would be http://forums.evolutionm.net/index.php?

There owners are able to interact with other owners and share tips and trade tuning secrets online without any costs. Various individuals are able to share their views and also trade car parts from one another without any written black and white agreement. Users trade so called ‘gifts’ with one another online this is what forms the gift economy.
However every economy has its downsides. Certain people tend to be narrow-minded; they feel if someone wants to give me something for free why should they return a favour. This would lead to the downside to the economy as more and more people think the same way the purpose of the ‘gift economy’ would lose its ‘gift’. Can a business be considered a gift to society?
The answer is yes for the case of DuPont, instead of distancing itself from the hazardous waste generated by customers, saw the problem as an opportunity to differentiate its offering in one of the most basic of commodities. The company took back the spent sulfuric acid, purified it, and resold it. This was good business because once DuPont got good at it, recycling turned out to be cheaper than creating from scratch. It also gained the company market share and margins in what had become to others a low-profit, uninteresting commodity. In this case, DuPont does well by doing good, thus winning both the exchange and gift paradigms. The sign of excellence in a new world of the larger self is not vast profit or possessions, but sufficient material success to allow large and thoughtful contributions to society. For some strategies of societal service, huge profits may be needed, for example to build up the capital to purchase forestry land and convert it to sustainable forestry, or to extend a chain of tutoring schools that serve those who otherwise might not read, including the poor.

Thus should be noted that relationships that are sustained by means of gifts have advantages and disadvantages, positive and negative values, compared to the instrumental relationships of the market place. While generating dependence, they allow for the possibility of intimacy and some form of connection. The gift tends to be a more social activity with all pluses and minuses that come with the social. The arts most likely would not survive without it

"Concepts of intellectual property, central to our culture, are not expressed in a way which maps onto the abstract information space. In an information space, we can consider the authorship of materials, and their perception; but ... there is a need for the underlying infrastructure to be able to make copies simply for reasons of [technical] efficiency and reliability. The concept of 'copyright' as expressed in terms of copies made makes little sense." (T.B Lee 1996)


References
Tim Berners-Lee, 1996. "The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future," http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html

Pinchot, Gifford (1995). "The Gift Economy" Retrieved February 6, 2007 from http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC41/PinchotG.htm

Kollock, Peter (1999). 'The Economies of Online Cooperation; Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace" Retrieved February 6, 2007 from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm

Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Addison-Wesley.

Maus, Marcel (1960 [1925]), The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, New York: W.W. Norton.