QotW4: Gifts

Is anyone really willing to give anything without wanting anything in return? In the past, the internet was never thought to gin so much through sharing of information. As stated by Kollock (1999), “given that online interaction is relatively anonymous, that there is no central authority, and that it is difficult or impossible to impose monetary or physical sanctions on someone, it is striking that the internet is not literally a war of all against all.” However, now, a huge amount of sharing and cooperation of information is done over the internet. This leads to the term, gift economy, because it means, “In which help and information is offered without the expectation of any direct, immediate quid-pro-quo” (Rheingold, 1993) - ‘A favor for a favor’. As long as sharing is involved, it belongs to the gift economy, with a bigger emphasis on the word, gift. Also, it can too be called a “sharing economy” (Gift economy, 2007). This is because sometimes people may need information yet not feel the need to return anything at the current situation.



An example of a gift economy that I am familiar with would be LetsSingIt.com - your favorite music community. LetsSingIt.com (LSI) is a music community where information about your favorite artists, lyrics news updates, can be found and shared with others. Every component of this site is for free. To participate in chats, discussions, a membership is required; however, that is free too.

How did LSI come about? Well, here is a brief summary of its history. Raymond Bonsee is the owner of LSI which originally started out as “Ray’s Music Site”. He started this site because he often found it difficult to find the lyrics he wanted. Thinking that others might feel the same way as he did, he created a free lyrics site which allowed easy search either through the artist’s name, or parts of the lyrics from the song, or album name or song name. Once it was created, it drew the attention of many and soon became a forum community made up of many different individuals. Hence, the interests of many were met. (LetsSingIt.com)

Moving on, through the amount of subscribers or people who go to the LSI site for lyrics, a rating poll will keep track of the most frequent searched song and rank the artists by the number of visits. Also, other than just discussions about lyrics and artists, any other topics are welcomed too. Here our world is made smaller through ‘global’ interaction. Thus, “gift economies are driven by social relations” (Bell, 1991).

However, nothing is perfect and yes the gift economy too has its ups and downs. With such free and easy discussion forums, it is normal that some ‘hooligans’ would see the need in wrecking the peace of a nice on-going discussion. There is no reason as to why they would want to do such a thing but we know that such people do exist. That’s why in LSI, they wrote a claim stating that if unacceptable conversations are going on, they will have the right to remove any particular conversation. (LetsSingIt.com)

In conclusion, after knowing what a gift economy is, that it runs with the concept of reciprocation instead of a ‘since I gave u something, you have to give me something else in return’, we know not to take it for granted. Not all the time would someone actually give anything in return but it’s what goes on in the forums that help. Should we not greatly accept what we have been given and work towards helping such forums is better than to bring it down. With relation to LetsSingIt.com, it is one of the many forums online that works as a gift economy because people come in to share anything though mainly about music.


REFERENCES

Gift economy. (2007, February 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, retrieved February 9, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy

Kollock, P. (1999). 'The Economies of Online Cooperation; Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace" Retrieved February 9, 2007 from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm

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

http://www.answers.com/topic/letssingit-com

http://www.letssingit.com/