Gift relationships are built on the twin ingredients of freedom and impact: positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact. An example of a gift relationship is someone volunteering (giving) support to a user of a socially beneficial service.

This is positive freedom in the sense of freedom to do some kind of activity, rather than freedom from some activity, which is the negative conception of freedom. See Isaiah Berlin’s lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty“. In addition, this is personal freedom in the sense of personal expression, responsibility and commitment freely entered into and of a non-binding nature.

‘Beneficial social impact‘ refers to whether the intention of the individual carrying out the activity, could reasonably be understood to be aiming to have a beneficial social impact, rather than whether a particular activity results in a beneficial social impact or not.

What is giving?

Think about the qualities of a great gift:

  • It is freely given, i.e. not a response to an explicit demand from the recipient or some formal obligation [personal positive freedom]
  • It meets the desire/needs of the recipient and has an impact (emotional, practical, etc.) [beneficial social impact]

The theory behind the gift economy is complicated and not everyone agrees on what makes a great gift.

Increasing visibility and the scale of giving relationships (PDF) are undoubtedly bringing about positive changes in how the gift economy works. However, social media has resulted in a paradox for the gift economy.

Social media is making giving more simple, and yet more complex.

Perhaps this paradox is one of the reasons for much of the ambivalence about social media amongst volunteer managers.

Non-profits with few resources and vulnerable service users may well have good reason to be more risk averse than private companies gambling with venture capitalists’ money. Seth Godin, an online marketing guru, asserted that non-profits were slow to adopt social media because they were afraid of change. This provoked an interesting debate about how non-profits have used social media.

Another reason is that given the importance of scale for social media to be most effective, it’s often a winner takes all situation. It’s no coincidence then that many of the social media land grabs (of market share) have been won by big multinational corporations.

Coming to terms with the paradox

In many ways, the use of social media has increased the social impact of giving by: helping to improve understanding on needy issues; enabled more specialist giving by increasing the quality and quantity of information; and, by increasing the technical simplicity of how to support causes directly.

However, social media has increased choice (personal freedom) of where to give in the gift economy. Now the giver is easily confused, where before messages may have been clearer (if more basic). Now the increasing diversity and complexity of issues makes it hard for the giver to evaluate the effect of their giving with the huge range of ways in which giving time, in particular, can be done.

Mapping giving relationships

Let’s look more closely at activities where the individual’s intention is a balance of positively expressing their personal freedom and creating beneficial social impact. We can begin to understand how the human activities behind the ‘giving’ ecosystem are related and how they are distinct.

Giving activities

It’s clear that these activities are closely related if placed on a scale according to two variables: positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact. Activities can be plotted on the x axis according to the extent to which positive personal freedom is the intention of the activity, and on the y axis according to the extent to which beneficial social impact is the intention of the activity.

Participation, volunteerism

Let’s explore this philosophically by looking more closely at the intent behind such ‘giving’ activity. What’s interesting is that a basic pattern emerges where participation activities predominate in the bottom left and volunteering in the top right.

Activities such as writing a letter to a newspaper, making a small donation or attending a public meeting, on the whole, are not primarily motivated either as an expression of personal freedom or as an attempt to bring about beneficial social impact due to their typical ad hoc nature and degree of personal commitment to the activity required.

However, activities that we can recognise as volunteering, where an individual freely makes a commitment and aligns with a cause, on the whole, are primarily motivated by a sense of personal freedom and the prospect of making some kind of beneficial social impact.

On this basis, participation and volunteering activities can be defined in the following way:

Participation is a type of giving activity where positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact are not the primary intention of the giver

Volunteerism is a type of giving activity where positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact are the primary intention of the giver

It is important to underline, this is not a measure of actual social impact or personal freedom that results. This would depend on many factors beyond the scope of this discussion. This is simply a philosophical attempt to understand the intent of the individual behind these types of giving activity, volunteering and participation.

Civic engagement, professional amateurism

When we turn to the outliers, activities based on civic engagement and professional amateurism (Pro-Am), we see a similar pattern. Professional amateurs, enthusiasts and hobbyists’ activities are primarily motivated by people following their passion and doing what they want. These tend to be activities whose intent is primarily about expressing personal choice, rather than about bringing about social change. These activities can range from inventing, creating cultural works or producing goods or services based on a hobby. This is not to ignore that massive social impact that professional amateur activities can have, it is simply to suggest that in relative terms and in the main, social impact is a secondary consideration.

Activities centering on civic engagement on the other hand, are primarily motivated by an intention to bring about some kind of social impact. These activities tend to be set up in a way that puts the creation of a beneficial social impact ahead of the relative freedom of the individuals involved to express themselves through the activities. Civic engagement activities can range from community service programmes for offenders, students serving their community as part of their studies or emergency services staffed by those giving up the time to serve their community in formal disciplined roles.

On this basis, Pro-Am and civic engagement activities can be defined in the following way:

Professional amateur activity is a type of giving activity where positive personal freedom, and not social impact, is the primary intention of the giver

Civic engagement is a type of giving activity where beneficial social impact, and not positive personal freedom, is the primary intention of the giver

Knowledge and understanding of how these giving activities fit together has never been very comprehensive. On the whole, each area of giving has been approached by area or sector rather than as part of a larger ecosystem of giving. Now with the growth in social media, it is the increasing visibility and scale on which gift relationships can operate that is causing traditional markers between the activities to shift and blur.

Perhaps these shifting sands are another reason in addition to the paradox of giving that have something to do with why volunteerism as a field seems ambivalent about this increasingly social web.

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  2. Mapping giving relationships
  3. Social media, gift economy and volunteerism
  4. Case study: social media and how it’s affected newspapers
  5. Understanding the web’s effect on social relations