My friend Jevon was at the IMA conference this weekend and returned home this weekend, concerned that many there were pushing for a transactional model for public radio on the web. Dale Hobson at NCPR ads his concerns here:
I'm writing tonight from the 34th floor of the Seattle Crowne Plaza, with a gorgeous nightlit view of the Space Needle and the harbor, so a certain Olympian perspective can be expected, I suppose. NPR station KPLU is providing the inspirational jazz, and the Integrated Media Association is providing the food for thought in its annual examination of the state of the online art. The morning's keyote sessions provided a disturbingly dystopian view of the media future, characterized by crumbling support models, diminishing attention span, abandonment of locality, fragmentation of audience, and a voracious appetite for all the information, all the time, everywhere. The future of public conversation, some say, will look more like Times Square, and less like the campfire.
But as the mainline trend in media leaves behind the communities people actually inhabit, to serve the notional communities of our desires, it creates a growing opportunity for public broadcasting to serve within the vacuum created when the spotlight of mass attention moves elsewhere. Our communities of residence retain the needs they have always had, for the information they need in order to function as citizens of a particular locale, for the cultural space that distinguishes one place from another. Our society has never needed to invest in the most popular forms of media--they always find a path to the deep part of the revenue stream--but we often find we have to invest in the most useful forms of media, those that serve to define and inform the institutions that enrich community life. Public broadcasting finds itself at another of the choosing points in its history--whether to follow the trend, or to help create the countertrend.
Beware of the commodity and the transaction - I say. if you are in the true service business, then you live in the gift economy. This does not mean that you work for free but that your vocation and the service are primary.
Who today would be an exemplar of this? Firefighters. They earn a living wage but have an unparalleled prestige. When you meet them, they glow.
Who used to be like this? Teachers and Nurses. When you meet them you feel their pain and anger. Increasingly we think them selfish as they strike and do things that reduce our respect for them in the community. They used to be the two groups that people admired the most. What happened to them? They gave up vocation for profession. They left the gift economy and joined the transaction or market economy. Now the more that teachers fight for their "Rights" - not to supervise lunch or to take on extracurricular activities - the more they lose the support of their constituents and their ability to work with kids in class. The more nurses see themselves as technicians and not as healers and bringers of comfort, the more patients act out an get frustrated with the nursing care.
Public radio grew its audience from 10 -30 million in the last 10 years because they offered people a clear choice between the gift economy that nurtures the community and that acts like a human being and the market radio and TV that exploits its listeners and serves those that pay its bills and acts like a machine.
As many in public radio wonder how to commercialize what they do and how to measure transactions, let me remind you that you inadvertently are going down the path of the teachers and the nurses. Beware!
Before you think me naive as well, ask which models are thriving today? Is open source software in decline or on the rise? Is Wikipedia in decline or on the rise. Are businesses such as eBay that build community in decline or on the rise. Is the public media, blogs, podcasts etc in decline or on the rise. Why are several banks getting rid of the phone mail ladders and putting real people on the phone? Why is a site like Get Human up there?
If you wish to serve the public - you have to be human and you have to live according to the rules of the Gift Economy. See the follow on for more on what these rules are.
I beg you - don't at the moment of your greatest potential, take the wrong fork in the road.
Technorati Tags: Culture, Gift Economy, Nurses, Organization, Public Radio, Teachers
Here is an extended quote from Gift Economy example - Wikipedia
Hyde argues that when a primarily gift-based economy is turned into a commodity-based economy, "the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed."[20] Much as there are prohibitions against turning gifts into capital, there are prohibitions against treating gift exchange as barter. Among the Trobrianders, for example, treating Kula as barter is considered a disgrace.[21]
Commodity exchange bypasses the web of gratitude and obligation involved in gift-giving. It is possible, however, to reintroduce elements of a gift economy into commodity exchange, such as lagniappe given to a loyal customer, or a professional discount given to a colleague.
Less happily, elements of a gift economy can enter commodity exchange as nepotism, corruption, and bribery.
Hyde writes that commercial goods can generally become gifts, but when gifts become commodities, the gift "…either stops being a gift or else abolishes the boundary… Contracts of the heart lie outside the law and the circle of gifts is narrowed, therefore, whenever such contracts are narrowed to legal relationships."[22]
Even the most commodity-based economies have social (and/or legal) prohibitions on what may be commodified. In many societies, one may give up a child for adoption, but may not sell one's child. In most U.S. states, almost any private sexual activity between consenting adults is either legal or informally tolerated if it does not involve the exchange of money; most intimate acts move into the realm of the criminal if money is exchanged. Organ donation is actively encouraged; however, the sale of organs is not merely considered a crime, but is almost universally considered a particularly unsavory crime.
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Examples in modern culture
Elements of gift economy exist within the contemporary world economy. The blood bank system prevalent in several countries, including the United States, gives no significant explicit reciprocation for donations of blood. Most organ donation systems give no compensation of any sort to the donor or their family; payment in this matter is often considered suspect, even criminal.[23]
Information is particularly suited to gift economics, as information can be copied and transmitted at practically no cost. It can be treated as a nonrival good: when you share information, you do not deprive yourself of the information (although you may deprive yourself of certain revenues that could be gained in the market economy from the intellectual property rights).
Traditional scientific research is an information gift economy. Scientists produce research papers and give them away through journals and conferences. Other scientists freely refer to such papers. The more citations a scientist has, the more prestige and respect he or she has, which can attract funding and positions. All scientists therefore benefit from the increased pool of knowledge.
The free software community is an information gift economy. Programmers make their source code available, allowing anyone to copy and modify/improve the code. Individual programmers gain prestige and respect, and the community as a whole benefits from better software.
Yochai Benkler in his paper Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm writes that Ronald Coase described the firm as a more efficient form of production than the market. Benkler suggests a third mode of production called Commons-based peer production. Charles Leadbeater writes about the Pro Am revolution and the Pro Am economy where amateurs motivated by non-economic reasons are growing in power and supporting the sharing economy. Efforts such as Creative Commons led by Lawrence Lessig encourage sharing and argue that society and corporations will benefit from sharing.
Jordan Hubbard, writing in Queue magazine although referring to open source as a barter economy, describes it as a gift economy: "The volunteer software engineers in the open source software community are far more likely to help those who have demonstrated their commitment to the success of the overall open source software development process."[24] In other words, reciprocity is a broad community matter rather than explicit quid pro quo.
The Wikipedia web-based collaborative encyclopedia is, in most of its operations, a thriving gift economy. Hundreds of thousands of articles are available on Wikipedia, and none of their innumerable authors and editors receives any material reward. Wikipedia has been constructed entirely out of gifts, and gives information freely. From time to time Wikipedia has engaged in fundraising activities, asking people to contribute funds toward operating expenses; these donated funds are gifts, albeit explicitly solicited ones. A tiny portion of Wikipedia's income comes from product sales, mostly T-shirts, mugs, and the like, with Wikipedia logos.
Because Wikipedia exists within a money economy, some expenses must be met with money, such as paying for servers, domain registration, and for certain IT work involved in server maintenance. Therefore, the information in Wikipedia is a gift economy, but some operational aspects of its website and related entities are not. Yahoo's provision of servers in Asia[25] for Wikipedia is on a gift basis; there is no explicit quid pro quo. However, several people raised concerns that future reciprocation may be expected beyond the prestige.[26][27]
Small-scale gift economies also exist in most families, with gifts of time, money, nourishment, shelter, and expertise being given without any overt negotiation of reciprocation. Similarly, parties can be considered to be smallscale, temporary gift economies, at which food, accommodation, beverages, entertainment and a gathering place are provided freely, with all or most attendees contributing without formal payment.
Another example would be when mentorship instills the gratitude that eventually leads the protegé to become a mentor in his or her own right.
Free schools are an example of educational opportunities in a gift economy. Members of a community share skills, information, and knowledge outside of institutional control.
A gift economy is also an important cornerstone of the annual Burning Man festival, the Freecycle Network and of the give-away shop.
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Obstacles to a pure gift economy
Although no thinkers have yet specifically made criticisms against a pure gift economic implementation, there are several obstacles which may oppose its pure implementation as advocated by Peter Kropotkin in an anarchist communist society. Limited forms of a gift economy exist between families, in the context of friendship, or within small communes, such as the Economy of the Iroquois in their relatively small tribes. However, as the size of the economy increases such as in modern cities, the ability of a gift economy to comply with this economy of scale encounters obstacles because the links or memories individuals must make or have about between other members of the community become more numerous in order to apply the proper punitive measures to those who refuse to work when they have such an ability.
Milton Friedman and other free market and rational choice theorists argue that alternatives to free market economies will provide weak incentives, and criticises such altenatives because he does not believe there is any incentive for innovation or production as time progresses. With such weak incentives, they believe that very few goods or services will be produced for society compared to a market economy. They believe that without property arrangements, prices, and wages, there is no way to calculate individuals' needs and wants, and hoarding may result.
Because such views generally do not attack the gift economy per se, but alternatives to free market economies in general, proponents of a pure gift economy advocate that other social mechanisms within a gift economy will replace the need for prices, which carry information about needs and wants. In this context, other individuals make the judgment which wants or needs is to be fulfilled first, in contrast to a market economy where goods would be allocated to the consumer offering the highest price. Those offering and giving the best products would then gain standing in the community.
Kropotkin argues that mutual benefit is a stronger incentive than mutual strife and is eventually more effective collectively in the long run to drive individuals to produce. The reason given is that a gift economy stresses the concept of increasing the other's abilities and means of production, which theoretically would then increases the ability of the community to reciprocate to the giving individual. Other solutions to prevent inefficiency in a pure gift economy due to wastage of resources that were not allocated to the most pressing need or want stresses the use of several methods involving collective shunning where collective groups keep track of other individuals' productivity, rather than leaving each individual having to keep track of the rest of society by him or herself.
