Whenever I get into a new business I study it pretty extensively. I read everything I can get my hands on and spend time with a lot of experts to be able to make new connections, form my own opinions and re-think how and why things might work once a new product or service is introduced. A lot of my opinions of the social media industry is based on my research of community, economics and anthropology.

My study of gift economies started with the work of Marcel Mauss and formed a lot of my thinking of how our social economies work. The participatory nature of our social playgrounds are powered by reciprocity. By social playgrounds I refer to places such as Flickr, Facebook, blogs, Digg, MySpace, Last.Fm, Twitter, Wikipedia, Second Life which are just a few places people gather to express themselves and interact. Reciprocal exchange power each of these communities. This act of reciprocal exchange is described in a concept called ‘total prestation’. This is from the Wikipedia entry on Mauss theories.

In his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never “free”. Rather, human history is full of examples that gifts give rise to reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” (1990:3). The answer is simple: the gift is a “total prestation”, imbued with “spiritual mechanisms”, engaging the honour of both giver and receiver (the term “total prestation” or “total social fact” (fait social total) was coined by his student Maurice Leenhardt after Durkheim’s social fact). Such transactions transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that according to Mauss is almost “magical”. The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: “the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them” (1990:31). Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient. To not reciprocate means to lose honour and status, but the spiritual implications can be even worse: in Polynesia, failure to reciprocate means to lose mana, one’s spiritual source of authority and wealth. Mauss distinguished between three obligations: giving - the necessary initial step for the creation and maintenance of social relationships; receiving, for to refuse to receive is to reject the social bond; and reciprocating in order to demonstrate one’s own liberality, honour and wealth.

Gift economies typically manifest in cultures that enjoy economics of abundance and who have rapidly climbed Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. If you are looking into the future, our technological advancements will add more power to these changes and will start to affect more industries.

Tara Hunt who stopped by Akoha for a recent visit while she was in Montreal, wrote a great post on how gift economies are helping her build Citizen Agency.

These are interesting times and we have only just begun to see what kind of services and new opportunities will be created, as old economic models based on scarcity are replaced.

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On Wed 18 Jul 2007.