canarytrap.net

So coming off the Luce days, a few things about internet + the world at large:

• The Open Net Initiative has released it’s annual review of filtering, surveillence, and info warfare. What’s particularly interesting to me as I glanced through it is how different regions filtered content. Some focused on content type (e.g. pornography), while others blocked sites due to certain events or types of sites (social networks, forums, twitter).
• An interesting piece by Byron Acohido suggesting the possibility that the Chinese government wasn’t behind the google attack isn’t definitive but does point out how quickly public discourse was to assign blame and depict China as a monolithic entity.
• Also very interesting is the summary of who’s writing about ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) for development by Ivan Sigal at Global Voices. Especially provocative are the observations regarding the challenges of reconciling development experts and ICT solutions and implementation.

• Speaking of groups typically overlooked by new media guru types — it turns out that blogging is on the rise amongst older adults.
• And speaking of neat stats and charts, a couple of pieces by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan in TechCrunch discusses the state of online video puts the emphasis on context in online video consumption.
• These read nicely next my CMS/C3 colleague Sheila Seles’ piece on why Apple hasn’t revolutionized TV (yet).

Finally, a couple of pieces contemplating crowd-sourcing:

• BBH labs asks where the agency ends and the crowd begin in terms of creative and strategic development. This topic is one that touches on a lot of conversations I’ve been having recently, not the least of which is a fan labor/virtual sharecropping discussion that’s been occurring on and off on the ROFLcon organizing list.
• Through the comments on the BBH piece, I came upon the work of Daren Brabham, including his short piece in Flow about crowdsourced advertising.
• Related to the issues of crowdsourcing and co-creation, Harvard’s Radio Berkman posted up a talk on the Failing Fantasy of Intellectual Property
• And to balance out the Cambridge set, MIT’s CMS Colloquium podcast tackles old/new media and “re-fashioning” with speakers Wayne Marshall and Joel Burges. Listen for the ultimate “hmmmmm” line: “how do we theorize time?”

I wasn’t able to get a blog post up earlier this week because I spent Tuesday and Wednesday with the Henry Luce Foundation’s fellowship selection board (and Thursday catching up on all the sleep I didn’t get Monday and Tuesday night). But I wanted to get something up so a handful of scattered, poorly articulated thoughts ahead:

Recursive Thinking

It was a refreshing break in perspective from the marketing/advertising/media/consumer culture world. The selectors were astonishingly accomplished individuals who hand strong hands in international politics, policy, development, finance, and so forth.

The questions I was asked over the course of two days were provocative and unlike any that I’ve dealt with from corporations or colleagues. After all, here were people who knew tremendous amounts about culture, media, politics and the world at large, but not about what I knew about. And it made me realize how insular our world can become, how easy it is to find ourselves shaping discourse exclusively with those working from a shared set of assumptions, and how much that might potentially hinder new thinking.

It seems reasonable to want to step back from the building recursion of conversations and interrogate some of the fundamental assumptions. Not just popular opinions that have been taken as fact but ideas so deeply a part of the very structure of thinking around new media that they’ve become naturalized. One of the questions I was asked is that if I were consulting with a company that wanted to bring a new product to Asia, what would be my most crucial and fundamental piece of advice? I gave a number of examples and talked around it a bit, but the core of my answer was simply this: that thing that you think you most know, the most absolute conviction you have — let go of it. If you can’t make room for your own ignorance, you can’t begin to rectify it.

So what’s the most fundamental, unquestioned assumption about new media? What immediately came to mind was first that new media is new and more to the point, that it’s what’s changed that strive to understand if we are to anticipate what’s to come. As a long-standing CMS tenant, there is as much continuity in media (and media use) as there is rupture. There is, it seems, as much to be learned from looking at what hasn’t changed, the habits and behaviors and desires that have endured across technological development are what can point us how technological change will be adopted and adapted. For instance, we think of fanservice — media producers following conversations about their properties online and then changing scripts in response — as relatively new, afforded by online forums and blogging. But fanservice has been the very foundation of the monolithic Northeast Asian idol industry since the 1960s, and before that, Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead due to fan response. And looking at what remains the same can give us insight into what has changed: after all, the re-emergence of fan service in broadcast media can be attributed to the fact that we’ve come back to a point in which media production technologies and consumer technologies are matched in speed.

Another problematic assumption we’ve come to rely on is that the new is desirable. There’s such a focus in industry now on early adopters and the “bleeding edge” (and honestly, did no one think that metaphor through? You have to cut before you bleed, so the bleeding edge is actually just a bit behind the cutting edge) that there’s a tendency to assume a “wired” group who “gets it” and everyone else and that it’s the former that’s engaged and informed. Too often the assumption is that not everyone has adopted a technology simply because they’re behind and will sooner or later catch up and fall in line. But this perceived lagging group includes people like those that I met with on Tuesday and Wednesday who no doubt wield greater influence in the affairs of the world than any social media guru can ever dream of. Why aren’t we thinking more about their media use (or lack thereof)? Why aren’t we giving deeper consideration to how they use these tools, which tools they consider valuable, and how they might reshape the way these tools are used when they do decide to join in? In focusing to narrowly on new media culture, do we run the risk of dismissing culture at large?

So I’ve been a little lax on my “weekly” reading round-ups, but slowly trying to get back in the swing of balancing out intake to output.

As many of you know, Thursday was Data Privacy Day.

• Google released a video and written listing of its privacy principles, explaining how it uses its user data.
• Speaking of privacy and google, a recent CNN piece by Bruce Schneier reveals that Chinese hackers were aided by US government policy
• And of course, we can’t talk data privacy without talking Facebook, who posted 5 key privacy tips. Which is nice and all, but just another consolation prize in a long line of Facebook v. your data.
• Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb write about Facebook’s history with privacy with a distinctly positive view of the long-term implications. While I see his point, I remain somewhat discomforted not because of privacy, but because of ownership of my data.
• An article from 2005 on CNET by Kimber Spradlin comparing privacy legislation in the US and Europe is interesting in this context. Although she focuses on commerce and security issues, she does note that in Europe, individual data can be loaned for use by companies, but ultimately is owned by the individual, an attitude that isn’t prevalent in the US. It brings me back to a point that I think always bears repeating, which is that “privacy” violations are often more about use and ownership than wanting to keep information locked away, about who has rights to profit from our information, and what control we have over that.

I’ve kind of avoided talking about the Ipad (which, I know it’s been pointed out ad nauseum by now, but . . . that’s what you decided to call it?). New technology is cool, but what I care more about is the technological use side of things. I want to see what happens once the new gadget has been incorporated into our lives and cultures, what standing needs it fulfills (and what new ones it brings to surface). But I did enjoy Annalee Newitz’s i09 piece about Apple’s Crap Futurism, which gets to the point of why I find the ipad so lackluster. For something that I think many of us fantasized about as a sort of sci-fi future artifact — something that would come in handy as we stage a guerilla resistence in the face of a fascist dystopia built on the rubble of the world is once knew — it just doesn’t seem all that useful. But again, we’ll see. Technology alone doesn’t change how we think. How we think about technology — its role, its capacities, its uses — is what moves us forward.

And, oh yeah! Jürgen Habermas, social theorist and communications guru before the time of gurus, now apparently has a twitter account. I can’t decide if it’s more awesome if it’s actually him or someone pretending to be him. Either way, I can’t believe it took so long.

Communities are complex social formations with a nuanced system of structures, roles, and behaviors. In the world of brands and corporations, this fact it too often overlooked in favor segmenting communities according to the priorities of the brand. Brands need to know who can help push their agenda amongst the community — communities are segmented into “influencers” and “everybody else.” Or, the oft-referenced “ladder of participation” gets trotted out. Though it has more segments, it nevertheless defines participation according to criteria of activeness.

Of course, who wields influence in a community and which activities (blogging, linking, reading, etc) are common are things that marketers need to know. But if we want to actually act upon this knowledge and influence those influencers, it’s equally important what aspects of a community different types of members influence and how (and why). Similarly, with the ladder of participation, it’s incredibly useful to understand what people do (or don’t do). However, as more and more people are adapting participatory technologies into their lives and communities, it becomes equally important to understand what they’re doing it for.

In short, communities and their members must be understood in the context of the community’s structures. Only then can we begin to understand not only who they are and what they do, but how their actions and their brand relationships will be received by the community at large.

Community Structures: Types, Roles, and Behaviors

Every community is different, of course. They develop unique systems and social contracts amongst the members that define the boundaries of the community. There are, however, a some definitions that we can use as a baseline to approach understanding communities online.

While I have my own loose , they aren’t nearly as thorough as what Lara Lee and Susan Fournier developed with over 30 years of research on community formation.

3 Types of Community Affiliation

Fournier and Lee describe 3 types of community affiliation:

Pools are groups who “have strong with a shared activity or goal, or shared values, but loose associations to one another” whose affiliation is created through “shared activity, goal, or values.”

KEY EXAMPLES: Apple fans, Political Parties, Ravelry

Webs are groups who “have strong one-to-one relationships with others who have similar or complementary needs,” where affiliation is primarily defined through “personal relationships”

KEY EXAMPLES: Facebook, Twitter, cancer-survivor networks

Hubs are groups who “have strong connections to a central figure and weaker associations with one another,” and define their affiliation through “a charismatic figure.”

KEY EXAMPLES: Oprah, Joss Whedon, Obama

These categories, of course, are not absolute and there’s plenty of cross-over. For instance, we might characterize a typical high school social system as a web that has within it a number of different hubs and pools. Similarly, Obama-supporters can easily also be seen as a pool, and Apple fans might cluster around Steve Jobs as a hub.

Community Roles

Fournier and Lee also outline 18 typical roles that individuals take on in communities:

1. Mentor: “teaches others and shares expertise”

2. Learner: “enjoys learning and seeks self-improvement”

3. Back-up: “acts as a safety net for others when they try new things”

4. Partner: “encourages, shares, and motivates”

5. Storyteller: “spreads the community’s story throughout the group”

6. Historian: “preserves community memory, codifies rituals and rites”

7. Hero: “acts as a role model within the community”

8. Celebrity: “serves as a figurehead or icon of what the community represents”

9. Decision-Maker: “makes choices affecting the community’s structure and function”

10. Provider: “hosts and takes care of other members”

11. Greeter: “welcomes new members into the community”

12. Guide: “helps new members navigate the culture”

13. Catalyst: “introduces members to new people and ideas”

14. Performer: “takes the spotlight”

15. Supporter: “participates passively as an audience for others”

16. Ambassador: “promotes the community to outsiders”

17. Accountant: “keeps track of people’s participation”

18. Talent Scout: “recruits new members”

I would also include two additional roles that are prevalent amongst content-creation communities:

Curator: organizes and curates community content for easy navigation

Enabler: scaffolds the creation process to encourage community content production

Community Behaviors & Activities

Finally, all communities have their own set of specific activities, but the rise of participatory culture and the networked information economy has lead to the increasing scale and visibility of a general set of behaviors.

Building from Clay Shirky’s work, Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine describes four key modes of online participation: Sharing, Cooperation, Collaboration, and Collectivism

Sharing: One of the most fundamental logics of social participation online. We use YouTube to share videos, Twitter to share status updates, Flickr to share images, Delicious to share links, blogs to share ideas and information.

Cooperation: Sites like Flickr aren’t just used to share photos, but tag, group, organize, and reuse under creative commons. Through cooperation, it becomes more than just a sharing platform — it’s a vast archival resource. Similarly, aggregation sites like Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot use cooperation to “steer public conversation.”

Collaboration: Collaboration describes more organized and focused cooperative efforts, where groups and individuals pool resources toward common goals. Open-source software is a key example, where many contribute labor and expertise towards shared software development.

Collectivism: More clearly structures and potentially ideologically driven examples of sharing, cooperation, and collaboration activities.

Thus ends the basic primer on online communities, compiled from observations from my work at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium and the work of many individuals way more awesome than myself.

The bottom line though really is that communities — online and off — are social and cultural formations. Understanding the surface trends and tools is the first step, but if we must also seek an understanding of the deeper driving structures if we hope to develop long-term strategic provisions in addition to short-term tactical responses.

Over the past few years, I’ve written countless times about brands and online communities and through it all there’ve been several concepts and principles that seem to crop up again and again. It seemed about time to lay out the most basic and general principles more systematically.

Brands and Communities: 3 Core Principles

Brands understand the value of online communities and the power of social media in making sure a brand isn’t just a product, but a cultural resource and symbol. Online communities are one of the best ways to get to know your consumers, deepen loyalty, and broaden a brand’s cultural and marketing reach.

But building a community that is loyal, ef?cient, and real is about more than just getting talked about. It’s about more than just having a Facebook page, or twitter followers, or blog comments. It’s about fostering real engagement by understanding how communities work, how they use technology, and what kind of contribution
the brand can bring into the mix. In short, in thinking about

1. Courting (not creating) communities

Many brands, when building a social presence online believe themselves to be in the business of creating communities. But a brand’s community isn’t a coherent entity with the singular goal of promoting the brand. While an online community can certainly act as a full-throttle promotional team, they do so because being part of the community serves a variety of individual purposes.

Brands, therefore, must thinking of themselves as courting communities. The digital world is densely networked and no consumer is an island. They’re a part of active communities that have their own interests and goals. Brands have to ?gure how to make themselves of value to these communities if they hope to integrate themselves and build strong ties.

Find where your communities are and listen, learn what tools they use, what content they ?nd compelling, what tone they converse in. Find out what matters to them, learn from what they do, and how to participate on their terms. Only then can the brand build the trust and understanding it needs to cultivate a strong community. Look to key community members and get them to be intermediaries for you. They know better than any marketer how to speak to their own communities.

2. Be the means, not the ends

Brands can build strong communities by becoming the connective tissue between members. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Fournier and Lee state that in brand communities “brands are a means to an end, not an end in itself” (Fournier and Lee 2009). This seems simple enough, but it’s a misstep many brands make when the ask “how can we get people talking about us?” or even “how can we get people talking to us?”

The simple answer is that you don’t.

Brands build communities when they get people to talk through them, about and to one another. In a rich, lasting brand community, brands are the tools of communication, not the subject. It might seem counterintuitive, but acting as the connective tissue, brands can build deeper and more lasting relationships with their consumers because it integrates the brand into the rich social relationships consumers form with one another.

3. Cultivate, don’t control

One of the strongest instinct marketers and PR ?rms have when dealing with communities is to control them. No one wants people to say bad things about the brand, so there is an urge to stamp down con?ict or “misuse” of just negative feelings. However, trying to control conversations and opinion will only generate distrust and resentment. Instead, see con?ict as an opportunity to engage in conversation and get valuable feedback.

Be transparent in all your interactions in the community. Efforts to hide intentions, obfuscate mistakes, or redirect blame when con?icts arise will only fuel the ?re. Online communities operate on collective intelligence — you might be able to fool one person or even most, but you can’t keep things hidden from large communities, all working together and sharing labor and information. Transparency fosters trust, good-will, and can turn dissatisfaction into an opportunity to change minds and improve relationships.

Like many, I’ve been following the whole Google/China situation with some interest, it part because it really touches upon one of the central tensions surrounding increasingly globalized cultural and information networks and technological/legal infrastructures still organized around the nation-state. There’s been a ton written on it, but a few more comprehensive/interesting pieces:

• Of course, the official google blog statement regarding the matter and the Chinese government’s response.
• Darmishta over at the Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw blog has a pretty solid news round-up of the issue, including a link to the open letter from Issac Mao, a blogger in China, appealing to Google not to pull out.
• And I admit, I’m biased, but C3 also has a good roundup of key pieces in the discussion, as well as some commentary on the whole global/national tensions present in digital culture along the language and acess angle.
• ReadWriteWeb’s Richard Macmanus also discusses how this relates to google’s big competitor, Baidu. And Sarah Lacy over at TechCrunch points out that the whole Google or Baidu question isn’t just about China.

On the globalization and media tip, a few less newsy and more thinky things:

• Starting first with Aswin Punathambekar’s syllabus for his Media Globalization graduate seminar, which has lots and lots of great readings to dig into for anyone interested in how to think about media in a transnational context. Which, I think given how relevant we consider Google/China to our everyday lives, should be just about everyone.
• In Aswin’s syllabus is a link to a piece by Amitava Kumar about the limits of postcolonial theory, which in a way is also about the limits of theory as a whole.
• I’ve also recently been recommended the work of David Harvey, which I’ll start in on as soon as I procure some ebooks.

Back to more immediate media + culture stuff:

• If you haven’t by now, everyone should be reading Grant McCracken’s new book Chief Culture Officer. I admit, it’s another bias of mine, not just because Grant is full of awesome 24/7, but also the book basically makes a case for why people like me and many of my friends and colleagues should exist. Cultural understanding is crucial to the health of corporations, brands, media producers and it isn’t just something that happens. It’s a studied, systematic process, a skill-set that should be nurtured and deployed.
• A couple of pieces following Ford’s push into the media space: Karl Greenberg over at Marketing Daily and the AdAge Mediaworks piece from Craig Daitch. Have yet to gather my thoughts on this, but it does seem something worth watching.
• Finally, in a back to roots kind of move, I’m looking to start in on some of the readings listed in Henry Jenkin’s Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 syllabus. I didn’t even realize it when I first glanced at it, but if you scroll down to the section on global media, there’s a chapter from my thesis in there.

On a totally random note, I just realized that the two videos that were part of a project that I did with Kevin Driscoll, Whitney Trettien, and Lauren Silberman at MIT regarding Soulja Boy back in 2007, where a bunch of us in lab coats and GNU Richard Stallman danced the Crank Dat dance now has nearly half a million hits (almost 390,000 on one, and 80,000) on another. Granted, these numbers are nothing by YouTube standards, but still, a bit trippy for a random class project video done on an east campus lawn.

So I’ve been on a brief blogging hiatus the past couple of weeks because I’ve noticed a couple of startling behavior patterns. I can no longer go into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea without taking my phone with me (you know, in case I get some email in the couple of minutes it takes to boil water) or sit down to watch something on TV without also reading blog feeds and fiddling with wordpress themes. I recently had a two-hour conversation with someone sitting right next to me, in my apartment, entirely over Gchat.

Which is to say, there’s multitasking, and then there’s justifying a pathological need to do too much stuff at once, so I took a bit of a breather, read some books, caught up on some TV, had tea without email. Flipside, here I come!

But now I’m back and ready for more thinkiness and blabbering and a not-quite-frequent-but-semi-regular blogging schedule.

I recently stumbled across a post on tomatonation.com regarding the controversy surrounding prominent mommy-blogger Shellie Ross’ decision to tweet about her son drowning. I had heard vaguely about it previously and dismissed it with a long-suffering “oh lord, the internets” eyeroll, but the tomatonation piece make me think about it a little more closely.

Putting aside the impossibility (yet sad inevitability) of judging someone else’s grief, it doesn’t make sense to demonize any one channel of communication as wholly unfit for one type of information and not others. Technologies are anything but innocent of social power, but they also don’t come with predetermined regulations of use. But if we look at Madison McGraw’s now infamous backlash against Shellie Ross, it becomes clear that much of vitriol comes out of a sudden conviction that tweeting — that online activities — encroaches on the real life duties of motherhood.

In other words, the backlash is symptomatic of our contemporary crisis between public and private life, yet another flare-up of a long-brewing technology-triggered moral panic like the ones that have accompanied the development of everything from motion pictures to railroads. Once private acts can now bind us with networked publics, and public events come ready-made with backchannels of private communication. Twitter, and other social media technologies, are generating increasingly contested contact zones between the ideological bravado of the public sphere and the deep intimacies of the domestic one, a digital borderlands where it is becoming harder and harder to differentiate one from the other. And it is becoming harder and harder to accurately anticipate what things are best kept to ourselves.

Moreover, Shellie Ross’ tweets became the focus of such vicious backlash not only because it transformed one of the most deeply domestic acts — child rearing — with a very public one, but also because we are culture for whom public displays of mourning, however abbreviated, remain significantly taboo. Even now. Or perhaps especially now, as technological advancements and wonderous gadgets reassure us of our progress, our ever-increasing forward momentum. And it is disconcerting to see these things as an outlet for something as gear-halting as simple grief. Mourning seems the ultimate recursive loop.

But consider: we humans make sense of our traumas and delights by calling them out, giving them the names and reasons needed in order to share their burdens with one another. In that light, perhaps twitter is an appropriate vehicle for grieving after all. Its limited space gives us the freedom to articulate our distress with whatever utterances we can salvage from the wreckage, however mundane or superficial, and verify that we continue to exist even as someone else does not. And its publicness may remind us, crucially, that though our lives have suddenly grown unimaginably smaller, we are still not yet entirely alone.

Sorry for the delay – I meant to post this on Monday but got caught up and totally slipped my mind. Anyway, here’s the last part of the executive summary. You can read Par1 1 and Part 2 and Part 2 in this blog and download the full paper here.

I’m hoping to get up a full research page in the coming weeks, with all papers, short pieces, and presentations I’ve churned out over the last couple of years, so look for that soonish.

Anyway:

Conclusions: Locating Value and Courting Communities

Final Principles:

• Within market exchanges, things enter the transaction with a set value. In non-market exchanges, however, the value comes out of the transaction. So the value is actually created through. and comes out of, the context of the exchange, rather than being set before the good enters it.

• The difference, then, between gift and commodity exchange is not that one is socially regulated while the other is economically or rationally regulated, but rather the speci?c rules and regulations that come into play. The differences are in how these regulations are deployed, and the relative role of the context and terms of the exchange itself rather than the contents of the exchange.

• The networked and visible participatory practices online requires media producers recognize both market and non-market systems of exchange and the types of value and worth produced in order to engage audiences online.

• When we seek to build businesses around users generated content, or when we’re trying to engage in social media campaigns, or when we see violations of IP, all activities that are now becoming common in any media brand or property. We can’t simply take pieces of different systems of value and cobble them together and hope for the best, nor can we simply take one system and place it within the architecture of another.

• It does a potential disservice to media properties to simply apply the regulations of control from market systems onto non-market ones, such as in the case of DMCA takedown sweeps that remove content which not only fit within the boundaries of fair-use, but also stop audience activities that potentially generate more marketing value than cause damage.

• Ultimately, the essence to being able to court a community and build an enduring relationship with your brand requires an understanding what kind of system your fans and consumers think they’re in. That is to say, in trying to create a system that can be mutually beneficial, and generate both market value and social worth, you must fully acknowledge and honor the parameters of both systems of exchange.

Here’s part 2 of the executive summary to my most recent white paper, completed earlier this year and now available to the public. This part digs more into the differences in regulation and expectations between monetary and non-monetary forms of exchange. Part 1 is here.

Spreadable Media Across Market and Non-market Exchanges

To truly begin to understand how media spreads, we must come to understand how it comes to move across social systems, cultural forms, technological platforms, and modes of market and non-market exchange. All things used in exchanges — be they physical goods or more ephemeral things such as services, information, or experiences — carry three basic forms of interrelated value: use-value, symbolic-value, and exchange value.

• Use-value: An object’s use-value is most plainly the material characteristic of an object, that does not mean it isn’t subject to social or conditional regulation.
• Symbolic-value: The second dimension of value comes from an understanding of consumer culture. Symbolic-value is what differentiates goods or services that have similar use-values. Brands, for instance, are the bearers of symbolic-value.
• Exchange-value: Finally, exchange-value, is the translation of a good’s use-value and symbolic-value within a system of exchange. A good’s potential use-value to someone else determines the value that it can be

These then are the three key dimensions of value present in any form of exchange, whether that be one regulated by money and market logic or by social relations. It is therefore not a question of whether or not a form of exchange has value, but of the roles each dimension of value has in shaping the terms of the exchange.

The Social Dimension of Market and Non-Market Exchanges

The use-value and symbolic-value of an object is determined by its social context then translated into a monetary exchange-value. In a non-market gift exchange, it is the opposite wherein the context — the social relations — play the primary role. Rather than a question of whether something costs money or not, it is more a question of where the core value is determined, and for what ends.

There are three general distinctions that can be identified between market and non-market systems of exchange, as indicated in the table below.

Impersonal versus Socially Regulated Exchanges
Market exchanges, generally, are impersonal while non-market exchanges are socially regulated. The use of money as the primary token of value in market exchanges is precisely what makes them impersonal. The nature of the relationship between the parties involved in the exchange does not have an impact on the value of the good or service being exchanged in a market exchange. On the other hand, the value of an exchange in a non-market setting is heavily determined by the relationship between the people involved in the exchange.

Discrete versus Ongoing Transactions
Since market-exchanges are governed by asocial relations, they are also discrete in the sense that they don’t create an ongoing relationship. That is, market-exchanges are oriented towards acquiring the goods available for the cash you have; their purpose is not to make friends, or create an ongoing relationship. Non-market exchanges, on the other hand are engaged in “in order to evoke an obligation to give back a gift, which in turn will evoke a similar obligation — a never-ending chain of gifts and obligations” (Kopytoff 2006: 69). The completion of an exchange in a market-exchange situation finalizes and marks the end of the transaction.  In a non-market situation, the idea is to build an ongoing social relationship rather than to simply exchange goods and obtain the “counterpart value.”

Absolute Exchanges versus Legacies of Exchange
A purchase from a vendor demands no further obligations after payment because the exchange is ?nal and the producer of the good exchanged has no further say in how it can be used. In contrast, a non-market exchange creates a legacy of exchange where even when someone has given something, they have some expectations and claims to that gift and how it is used. In a system of market exchange, the symbolic-value is part of the goods and services being exchanged. Any copy of a book purchased from Amazon has the same symbolic value as any other copy. As long as what is exchanged is identical, so then is the value because the symbolic-value and the use-value is also identical. In non-market transactions, such as gift giving, the symbolic-value is tied to the actual exchange so that identical gifts given under different circumstances have different values. A book given to you by a close friend therefore has the same use-value as any other copy, but a totally different symbolic-value that is generated by the mutual ties expressed in the exchange.

Companies that try to make money from user-generated content must recognize that their users still feel some sense of ownership over the content they create, even after they’ve agreed to hand over their data and content in exchange for use of the service. Companies that fail to recognize this run the risk of alienating their user-base and leaving people feeling exploited, rather than served.

In the final installment coming next week, look for a rundown of conclusions, and a download of a full paper.