Prologue: I’m really interested in the lessons for voluntary organisations from the experience of the media industry facing the social media revolution square on. How can we build a positive agenda of organisational change that adapts best to this new networked reality?

I think that many in the voluntary sector (the formal part to some extent, but especially the informal part) have internalised much of how gift economies work in practice, because that’s where the sector’s roots lie. Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? and Chris Anderson’s Free are interesting because they mark a shift in the thinking in the private sector. The gift economy is going mainstream. A book like Andrew Keen’s ‘The Cult of the Amateur‘ demonstrate that the reaction against the growing significance of giving activities in the mainstream economy. Keen’s argument is not economic, it’s cultural. Volunteers and amateurs represent a threat to our culture.

Increasingly, as new market opportunities that social media opens up become better understood, they’re effectively coming to know what many in the voluntary sector have always understood. That is, that relationships based on giving have a value socially, spiritually, politically, culturally and economically.

Case study

The newspaper industry is one example of how social media has brought a professional sector closer to the gift economy and, as a consequence, is now encountering many issues that are all too familiar to those in volunteerism.

While newspapers were only printed, publication and distribution were costly. As a result, the means of production were in the hands of the few who could pay what it cost to run a mass circulation newspaper. With the advent of the internet, newspapers went online and many dipped their toe in the gift economy giving their content away on the web in the hope of somehow monetizing the increased reach. Others stuck resolutely with the exchange economy, following an online subscription model: money in exchange for access to content.

Now though, the gift economy is better understood by newspaper publishers. Social media means readers can comment directly on an article, rather than write a letter to the editor. They can share an article with friends, sending a link to their contacts via social networks. Readers can now even help contribute to the content of the online newspaper itself, sending in photos, editing collaborative articles or acting as an eyewitness from the scene itself as social media facilitates communicating in real time.

Social media operates so effectively because we like to give. We like to give our opinion. We want our ideas to gain currency and our thoughts to be validated. We like to give others the benefit of our network, passing information on. Above all, we like to give, to be useful and helpful to others. There are lots of reasons we give as we each have our own personal reasons for giving.

Co-Production and making money a metaphor for giving

The significance of social media for volunteerism is that it is providing the means to build on ideas that pre-date the technology itself. One such idea is that of co-production. It’s a term originally coined by Professor Elinor Ostrom, by later developed by Edgar Cahn. As with the idea of prosumers, it looks to produce results by bringing together service providers and service users.

Time Banks founded by Edgar Cahn are an interesting example of developing a system that promotes the exchange of giving. It’s a curious hybrid of the exchange and gift economies. Cahn used the metaphor of exchange, to explain the power of giving in familiar terms. In so doing, he was positioning volunteering at the core of society and off the fringes.

In a Time Bank community whatever you give is measured in time. ‘Time dollars’ are banked at a local Time Bank and can then be exchanged for something another member of the local Time Bank is prepared to give. Cahn developed Time Banks around the importance of the ‘core economy‘: home, family, neighbourhood and community. It’s important to recognise that a large part of the gift economy is often overlooked. When faced with supporting family and friends, it’s natural to give, rather than seek to exchange.

The interface between formal and informal volunteering

Interestingly this means that few would consider giving time to family as volunteering. In the UK, the government’s Citizenship Survey deliberately avoids tracking giving activity between relatives. NFPSynergy in March 2009 have argued persuasively (PDF) that the Home Office’s definitions on volunteering which are fairly loose, tend to over-estimate the levels of volunteering. It’s worth considering that a large part of the work done in the gift economy is therefore taken for granted such as: raising families, making communities safe and vibrant, caring for the disadvantaged, fighting injustice, making democracy work, etc.

Ultimately, one of biggest opportunities that social media offers volunteer managers is in thinking through new ways to involve volunteers more in how their volunteering experience is managed. Many volunteering programmes already have co-production baked into them: typically mentoring, befriending or programmes training volunteers from amongst their service users are all examples.

Can the giving activities that make up volunteering move online?

It’s worth quickly getting some historical context. When ’surfing the net’ was a minority pursuit, many saw the online world as separate from the offline world. In 1999, the Netherlands became the first country where the majority of its citizens were online. Now, a decade on, it’s increasingly common for people to experience a merging of the activities they do online and offline.

This merging of experience has meant that the way we use the web has matured. We no longer use it for the novelty value or for the sake of it, we use it because it adds something to our lives. It augments, rather than shadows, real world giving activities. In the late 1990s when newspapers first went online, they were often an attempt to transfer the printed newspaper experience to the computer screen. It was a failure. They were a pale shadow of the printed newspaper in most cases.

To be used, newspapers on the web had to give us something we didn’t get from newspapers in print. Making newspapers social media friendly has been a big element in how newspapers online have evolved to give readers an experience that augmented their real world experience. The jury’s out on where we’ll be getting our news from in the next 50 years.

Moving to the web is a paradigm shift towards embracing the social web and ways of the gift economy. As Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics notes:

«Why didn’t NBC invent YouTube? Why didn’t AT&T launch Twitter? Yellow Pages should have built Facebook and Microsoft should have come up with Google. And Craigslist would have been a perfect venture for the New York Times.»

In each case, the new kid on the block took advantage of social media and moved to a giving model. But why has volunteerism found it so hard to harness social media when as a giving activity it’s already halfway there?

Hard as is for newspapers to move online, it’s a relatively simple proposition. News is after all based on the exchange of information and the web is a communication and information platform. Volunteering is, though, a very different proposition and in a way it’s no surprise moving online has been difficult. When you look at volunteering websites, many have simply transferred the volunteer brokerage service online, narrowing in on recruitment and volunteering opportunity search (e.g. Do-it, Volunteer Match, etc), the part of the volunteering experience that requires an exchange of information.

Information is importantly a nonrival good which may be consumed by one consumer without preventing simultaneous consumption by others. This makes information giving simpler and easier than other kinds of giving for rival goods.

It’s much harder to move over aspects of volunteering, such as learning from service users, sensing the difference your volunteering has made, supporting the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, etc. Faced with these kind of challenges, the web is not always the optimum platform and it starts to become more evident why those in volunteerism are unsure about how to harness social media.

How moving journalism online has brought it closer to other giving activities

The experience of many in the newspaper industry as they’ve moved online has demonstrated that when they use social media, giving is more effective than exchanging. A willingness to share and be open (as when giving to each other) is a more effective strategy than limiting supply and being closed (as when formally exchanging with each other). Jeff Jarvis believes that these giving relationships online amount to what he terms as a ‘link economy‘.

“Links can be exploited and monetized; get links and you can grab audience and show ads and make money. Content is becoming a cost burden, what you have to have to get the links, but in and of itself, content can’t draw value without an audience, without links.”

How do online newspapers get these links? They are given them by their audience, amongst them participants, enthusiasts and volunteer bloggers, by opening up their content and inviting people in. They can’t oblige consumers of their product to link. Instead they can make it easier and more worthwhile to link. It’s the gift economy in action.

Journalism is a profession that is going through the social media revolution. As the internet has provided a low cost content publishing and distribution system, writers willing to share their passion are stepping in to fill gaps that professional journalists are not filling, e.g. niche subjects, hyperlocal coverage, etc. As the internet is enabling networked communication in real time through sites like Twitter and Facebook, so witnesses to breaking news with a mobile handy are replacing the journalist reporting from the scene of the action.

Citizen journalism is where “members of the public play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information”. We Media sums it up as:

“Armed with easy-to-use web publishing tools, always-on connections and increasingly powerful mobile devices, the online audience has the means to become an active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information”

It’s a complicated picture. Citizen journalism grows out of the idea of civic journalism where readers are not treated as spectators, but as participants. It’s a participatory approach to journalism, where professional journalists are increasingly collaborating with amateur journalists to produce their work. It’s worth looking at different journalists working in this area such as Nick Booth, Help me investigate with Paul Bradshaw and those on Talk About Local.

This is taking journalism into the gift economy where it’s no longer a simple exchange between producers and consumers, writers and their readership. This new form of journalism is confronting issues familiar to many in volunteerism who’ve worked for many years in the gift economy.

  • How, as a professional journalist benefiting from information gifted by citizen journalists, should you recognise or reward their contribution?
  • How can professionals and amateurs work alongside each other?
  • How can journalists, that straddle the exchange and gift economies, fund their activity without changing the nature of the relationship they have with those who give to them?

Further reading

Jon Snow Interviews Professor Edgar Cahn. In this short clip Edgar explains the simple concept of Time Banking – Volunteering for the 21st Century which is sweeping across the UK.

Co-production – A Manifesto for Growing the Core Economy – New Economics Foundation (2008)

More From paddaniels

paddaniels has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

Related posts:

  1. Criminal Justice In Guatemala: A Salvadoran Case Study
  2. Social media, gift economy and volunteerism
  3. Final Update: Guatemala genocide case accompaniment
  4. Urgent Action: Murder of Brother of Lawyer in Gerardi Case
  5. UK Press Review: Rios Montt Has No Case To Answer (apparently)