COM 125- Assignment #4

In “The Economies of Online Cooperation,” Kollack refers to a “gift economy” as an online economy where help and information is offered, without the expectation of any direct compensation. Many people participate in a gift economy every day, but they probably don’t know that they are. A good example of a gift economy in which I am familiar with would be Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a gift economy, because it offers millions of articles to its online users and because none of the millions of authors and editors receive any kind of material reward. Of course, Wikipedia makes a minor amount of money of the sales of logo tee shirts and other merchandise, but they must also pay for their expenses, such as servers, domain registration and other maintenance. This part of Wikipedia would not be considered a gift economy, but the information on Wikipedia is a gift economy.

People can truly benefit a lot from the use of Wikipedia. The information that is available through Wikipedia is digital. This means that more than one person can access the same exact piece of information at the same exact time. Kollack refers to digital information as “exhibiting pure indivisibility”.  Using the information does not diminish what is available for the next user and the user after that. If you were to go to a library to research a topic, you would have to take out a book. When you take out a book, you need to pay money and worry about late fees. Also, when you take out a book, that information is the removed from the library and nobody else who visits that library can access that information until you return the book. Kollack also states that when you receive information from digital public goods such as Wikipedia, it can act as an incentive to give back and contribute to the public good yourself. In his blog, Dave Pollard agrees with digital public goods like Wikipedia. He tells us that our time is precious and suggests we should spend it as much as possible doing the things we enjoy. In doing this, we need to only buy goods and services that we cannot make available on our own. Why spend the money on something that you can get faster and easier and most importantly for free? I know that I try to use the internet as much as possible when doing research, because it takes less time and it’s much easier to use.

Sources:

 Kollock, Peter. (1999).The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace. Retrieved on September 17, 2008, from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm

 Pollard, Dave. (2005). “The Gift Economy” Retrieved on September 17, 2008 from http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/04/17.html

Gift Economy. Retrieved on September17, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy