Gift Shift
Description
Timothy Rayner:
"Gift culture is a mystery to most people in market societies. We are blind to this culture even as we participate in it en masse. This amounts to a major blind spot in our understanding of the social era and its implications for the future. Make no mistake: social media gift cultures have major implications for the future – and they’re kicking in today. Culture doesn’t stay put – it spreads virally in all directions. What we’re seeing today, right around the world, is a gift culture migration out of the virtual realm into the actual. Social sharing is becoming mainstream. People are exploring how to recreate the same practices and experiences that they’ve been enjoying online, offline. They are taking Potlatch culture to the streets.
I call it the gift shift. The gift shift is what happens when online gift culture flows off the internet into communities, coworking spaces, FabLabs, and businesses. Gift culture has landed and it is reshaping markets, business models, and consumer behaviours. In the coming years, the gift shift will disrupt business and society in a major way – for the social good.
We see the gift shift in the share economy, where people are renting, bartering, swapping and gifting clothes, cars, tools, rooms, and all sorts of goods and services in a peer-to-peer fashion. Rachel Botsman estimates that the consumer peer to peer sharing market is worth $26 billion dollars, and it’s growing fast. We see the gift shift in the maker movement, where people are sharing practical knowledge and open source computer designs to reinvent how everyday products get made, using home model 3D printers like MakerBot. We see the gift shift in the spiralling growth of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, which enable creative projects and startups to launch quickly without getting tied up in loans and investment capital. We see the gift shift in the way that the principles of social sharing are increasingly baked into the organisational structure of new business and community projects like Hub, reflecting an awareness that ‘social’ is not a set of tools but a set of cultural norms that are fast becoming part of mainstream life.
What binds all these projects and activities together isn’t a business model. It’s a common set of values and motivations. The motivation isn’t money. Most of the people participating in the gift shift are expending time and money, not earning it. True, renters and microentrepreneurs make money in the share economy, but their earning capacity is limited. On the whole, people engage in sharing-based activities for the intrinsic value, not extrinsic rewards. People want to feel like they’re contributing to something awesome. They want to feel like they’re helping build a tribal community – a collaborative social unit bound together by shared values, passions, and interests.
tribal-chief-wallpaperMost of all, people want to distinguish themselves through their gifts. They want the opportunity to be chiefs. This means they are looking to contribute from a position of abundance and generousity. Instead of asking: ‘what can I get?’, they are asking: ‘what can I give?’ What can I give to help strengthen the communities that I care about? How can I distinguish myself through giving, so that strengthening my tribe becomes an intrinsically valuable activity?" (http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/twenty-first-century-giving-how-facebooks-news-feed-catalysed-a-culture-shift/)