Barter and the gift economy on the Web
The concepts of giving, sharing and exchanging are modified and put into practice in new ways.
It may seem like a step back in time, a historic and economic try going in the reverse direction, with the mind (and wallet) to years in which crisis was normal and saving the golden rule to be observed at any age.
I’m talking about barter and the gift economy, who have returned to be part of our current vocabulary.
Barter is a system of exchange by which goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money. It is distinguishable from gift economies in that the reciprocal exchange is immediate and not delayed in time.
Source: Wikipedia
Contrast to consumerism? Need to save money? Active citizenship? Desire for human contact? Nausea because the money rules our daily lives in such an invasive way?
Ethnography has studied this phenomenon and it has found that the values of barter refer to the concepts of gift and exchange.
In the italian book “The gift in the Internet era” (Einaudi) scholars Marco Aime and Anna Cossetta examinate these concepts.
Why do we share on the Web? What are the sociological answers to file sharing, peer to peer, comments on blogs, forums, social networks and even Wikipedia? What makes us happy to freely give material produced by us with expenditure of knowledge, time and energy, if not money?
Everything is saddled on the concept of the gift economy, as opposed to the economy traditionally intended, based on market value and money.
The gift economy arises in the context of primitive societies that used to be economically self-sufficient producing by themselves most of what they needed and relying on the money economy only for those few products that cannot be produced by themselves, trading or reselling the surplus. According to the sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss through the gift people are trying to find their place in society.
The gift is the element of a system of mutual relations and the exchange of gifts is primarily designed to generate, to reiterate, to strengthen bonds and relationships.
Reciprocity is an economic exchange not based on the market, such as an exchange of favors for goods or services, aimed at the creation and confirmation of a link/relationship. While the exchange based on reciprocity is aimed mainly to the building of relationships, on the other hand it also highlights how this process is based on trust mechanisms.
The act of giving is part of a cycle, give — receive — return, where in giving you open up to a relationship with trust and by accepting (or rejecting) you accept or reject the relationship. The give and receive require a third interesting element: the return, that restores symmetry of roles between those who give and those who receive.
If the gift is the basis of relationships and reciprocity, what happens when it comes to the Web?
Barter and the Web have created and nurtured new forms of sociality between humans, we are facing the rising of new cultural patterns and relationships.
While people bring into their network experience and expertise as a gift to someone they don’t know to try to find their place in the network, on the other hand they are looking for answers to questions and needs, confident that someone has published what they need and at the same time trusting what others (unknown) proposed as true.
In the case of Wikipedia, for example, creating or deepening a voice makes a gift that is received by those who will access that information and perhaps in turn reciprocate, producing a form of participatory knowledge.
All these implications find in the Web platforms, free and open, ideal territory to fuel practical ideas.
In recent years, many forums and sites were born, dedicated to bartering and offering themselves as platforms on which barters converge, discuss and exchange.
Among the most famous websites in Italy there are Zerorelativo, Reoose, e- Barty, Eticambio. There is also a Barter Week.
You can find other examples of barter, those that fit within a circuit managed and regulated by a mediator, sometimes with the participation of businesses and other non-profit organizations.
This blog is written by the members of the FBDA / GROUP team. Learn more on www.fbdagroup.org
