Social media, gift economy and volunteerism

Social media is making the gift economy of today more visible. A good example of this new visibility is to run a simple keyword search on a website like Twitter.

I’ve just had an article published on the e-Volunteerism website: “Social Media and the Gift Economy: Volunteerism in the Vanguard”.

To follow up, I’m going to be posting on here unpicking the different aspects that I covered or touched on in the article itself.

My starting point when I began writing the article was looking at how social media is changing the field of volunteerism. Quickly though, it grew apparent, there was a recurring theme that promised to shed light on a lot of the issues that are hot topics in volunteerism today.

That theme had to do with a line of thinking about social media, volunteerism and the broader context of the gift economy:

1. Social media has led to the reemergence of the gift economy on a whole new scale
2. Volunteerism is one of the most developed forms of giving in many societies today
3. Social media is rewriting many of the rules of engagement for volunteerism because it’s rewriting the rules of the gift economy itself

I really interested in looking and better understanding the way social media is changing the gift economy, and beginning to chart some of what the impact might be in the world of volunteerism.

To give a really quick example. A few years back, as the concept of online volunteering gained traction in the UK, it became clear in the organisation I work at (online charity YouthNet) that the process of coming to a common understanding of what online volunteering was, was challenging the more traditional concept of what volunteering was.

How for example could you distinguish between someone who responded to an online call to action to sign an online petition and an online campaigns volunteer? Or, how could you distinguish between active members of an online community of discussion boards who posted supportive comments to others, and volunteer moderators in place to support the running of the discussion boards?

Up to a few years ago this was a non-issue, until that is, funders got interested in online volunteering and wanted to know the amount of online volunteers that an organisation involved (amongst other metrics) so that they could distribute funds accordingly.

This is a quick example, but it really just alludes to the tip of the iceberg. As the web has become increasingly social, it has in turn began to change the way people volunteer and get involved in social change.

What those changes are and how they affect volunteerism will be the focus of a series of posts on this blog over the next month.

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