Howard Rheingold’s 1993 book The Virtual Community, for instance, mentions the gift economy as central to relationships across the online world. Describing information as the web’s most valuable “currency,” Rheingold argues that the generalized spread of knowledge is one way of giving back to the larger community, suggesting, “When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions” (59). Richard Barbrook (1998), another early cybertheorist, argues that “network communities are […] formed through mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas,” practices that actually superseded commodity culture in the priorities of those who were the first to form online communities.
The early web was dominated by the ethos of the science community and a mindset in which researchers were obliged to address each other’s questions when they had relevant information to share. Rheingold describes this ethos less as a tit-for-tat exchange of value than as part of a larger reputation system in which one’s contributions are ultimately recognized and respected, even if there is no direct and explicit negotiation of worth at the time someone contributes. Companies were relative latecomers to the web, even though they now enjoy a dominant presence online. As commercial values have spread into the web, though, they have had to negotiate with the older web ethos.
That said, as anthropologist Igor Kopytoff (1986) reminds us, there remains a great deal of permeability in the relations between commodity and gift economies—especially within complex societies. The distinction between gifts and commodities does not describe their essence. Kopytoff explains, “The same thing may be treated as a commodity at one time and not another. […] The same thing may, at the same time, be seen as a commodity by one person and as something else by another. Such shifts and differences in whether and when a thing is a commodity reveal a moral economy that stands behind the objective economy of visible transactions” (1986, 64). Kopytoff understands commodification to be a “cultural and cognitive process” which shapes our understanding of the objects we exchange with each other (64). Though we idealize “gifts of the heart” and “labors of love,” most gifts these days are manufactured and store bought. There is often a magic moment when we remove the price tag from what we purchased and transform it from a commodity to a gift. People do not necessarily fear that gifts’ origins as commodities diminish the sentiments expressed through their exchange, though such exchanges may never fully escape the tendency to appraise gifts at least in part on the basis of what was spent on them. Conversely, as companies talk about their desire to build “relationships” with their audiences, their transactions will be judged—at least in part—on the basis of the norms and values of the gift economy. Objects in movement—media that spreads—thus may travel across different systems of exchange, often multiple times in the course of their life cycle.
In Remix, Lawrence Lessig (2008) describes contemporary culture as shaped by the complex interactions between a “sharing” economy (which he illustrates through reference to Wikipedia) and a “commercial” economy (which he discusses through the examples of Amazon, Netflix, and Google). Not everyone agrees these two economies can coexist. Jaron Lanier (2010) argues that an ethos which assumes information and media content “wants to be free” can destroy the market for anyone who wants to sell material for a profit—whether a big company or a small-scale entrepreneur. At the same time, since the logic of Web 2.0 tends to commodify all works—assuming they will make a profit for someone—it thus undercuts the desires of people who wish to share their material with each other as “gifts.”
For Lessig, as for us, the way forward is to explore various points of intersection between the two systems. Lessig writes about “a third economy,” a hybrid of the other two, which he thinks will dominate the future of the web (177–178). Evoking something similar to what we are calling a “moral economy,” Lessig stresses that any viable hybrid economy needs to respect the rights and interests of participants within these two rather different systems for producing and appraising the value of transactions.
Value, Worth, and Meaning
In the 1983 book The Gift, Lewis Hyde sees commodity culture and the gift economy as alternative systems for measuring the merits of a transaction. Gifts depend on altruistic motivations; they circulate through acts of generosity and reciprocity, and their exchange is governed by social norms rather than contractual relations. The circulation of gifts is socially rather than economically motivated and is not simply symbolic of the social relations between participants; it helps to constitute them. The commodity, Hyde suggests, moves toward wherever there is a profit to be made, while a gift moves toward resolving conflicts or expanding the social network (29). By contrast, he writes, “To convert an idea into a commodity means, broadly speaking, to establish a boundary of some sort so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee. Its benefit or usefulness must then be reckoned and paid for before it is allowed to cross the boundary” (105).
For Hyde, a commodity has “value,” while a gift has “worth.” By “value,” Hyde primarily means “exchange value,” a rate at which goods and services can be exchanged for money. Such exchanges are “measurable” and “quantifiable” because these transactions can be “reckoned” through agreed-on measurements of value. By “worth,” he means those qualities associated with things on which “you can’t put a price.” Sometimes, people refer to what he is calling “worth” as sentimental (when personalized) or symbolic (when shared with a larger community) value. Worth is variable, even among those who participate within the same community—even among those in the same family.
In that sense, worth is closely aligned with meaning as it has been discussed in cultural studies; the meaning of a cultural transaction cannot be reduced to the exchange of value between producers and their audiences but also has to do with what the cultural good allows audiences to say about themselves and what it allows them to say to the world. Talk about audience members making “emotional investments” in the television programs they watch or claims of a sense of “ownership” over a media property (such as those offered by Klink earlier) capture this sense of worth.3
The past couple of years have brought myriad examples of new Web 2.0 companies and longstanding brands alike misunderstanding what motivates audience participation. On the one hand, audiences are increasingly aware of the ways companies transform their “labors of love” (in the case of fan culture) or expressions of personal identity (in the case of profiles on social network sites) into commodities to be bought and sold. There is a growing recognition that profiting from freely given creative labor poses ethical challenges which are, in the long run, socially damaging to both the companies and the communities involved.
California-based online video start-up Crunchyroll.com found this out right after securing more than $4 billion in venture capital to support the development of its video-sharing platform for East Asian video. The company’s business plan was built around aggregating fansubbed material. However, the anime community was concerned that Crunchyroll.com was profiting without returning any value to dedicated anime fans and without bearing any of the potential legal liability that might emerge from effectively “commercializing” fansubbed material. As researcher Xiaochang Li notes, Crunchyroll. com hoped to profit on the back of fan labor while placing any costs of legal problems onto the fans, potentially damaging the implicit relationship between anime producers and fans in the process (2009, 24). Similarly, start-up company FanLib’s business model to commercialize fan fiction drew vocal objection in 2007. Fans who protested the company’s practices saw their work as gifts circulating freely within their community, rather than as commodities, and believed the companies that held intellectual property rights to appropriated characters were more likely to take legal action if a business model was built around these activities/creations