Reciprocity that powers the Internet

I have gone on and on about gift giving, gift exchange as a culture and the anatomy of giver-receiver relationships on this blog. It may seem like an absurd amount of attention to a largely anachronistic system. What does it have to do with consumers and markets?

Well, it was partly intellectual curiosity about consumer motivation. In papers about the sharing economy - which includes contemporary business models like ride sharing, couch sharing and furniture rentals - a popular topic in the field of consumer culture - I often encountered these throwbacks to principles from societies where the dominant medium of exchange and social cohesion stemmed from a fundamental belief and adherence to gift giving. I wanted to learn how gift economy could explain cogent everyday exchange so I went further down this rabbit hole.

As I encountered, the first of my unlearnings was to strip away the prefix 'economic' from exchange. The two are enjoined so that it has been impossible to conceive of a viable exchange that isn't economic. Or as I have learnt, exchanges that are first and foremost a sort of culture map that lead to a 'managed civilization'. This intrigued me so I built up from the foundation. Armed with all possibilities and manifestations of exchange motivation and exchange fulfilment the scope of conceivable business models, differentiation pegs and even tactical choices for managers widens considerably.

Hopefully the previous three posts on the foundations of gift culture, the vocabulary of gift transactions, and a thinking aloud about everyday transactions that are more “gifts” than mere “exchanges” has set us up to look at all marketplaces without prejudice. This post is a short summary of another place we inhabit everyday that was quite literally built as a gift and has continued to give each day - The Internet.