Com125 Assignment 4: It is better to give than receieve

What does the word economy mean? Economy is the act or means of thrifty savings. People tend to save their savings in order to become more wealthy individuals. Usually the more money people make the higher their status becomes, but thats not always the case if your not doing the right thing with your money. Gift economy sounds pretty similar to economy, but its actually very different. Gift economy is where computer users or some main source gives information to other users for free without expecting anything back.They put out resourceful advice out for the publics access. The person on the receiving end may never come in counter wit the person delivering their source of information. In the reading "The Economies of Online Cooperation" by Kollack (1999), Bell(1999) states in a gift economy, benefits come from improving the “technology of social relations” by, for example, increasing the range and diversity of one's social network. In commodity economies, the benefits come from making improvements in the technology of production. Thus, gift economies are driven by social relations while commodity economies are driven by price. According to the article,"The Hi-Tech Gift Economy" by Richard Barbook, he discusses how the gift economy evolved since 1998 when the paper was written.

How has the gift economy come about? In the article, "Internet gift economies: Voluntary payment schemes as tangible reciprocity" by Kylie J. Veale, she states, "exchange in the internet gift economy begins with the creation of a product, not unlike societies in the past, made available to the community at large for free. These products are a variety of digital items — Web pages, discussions or newsgroups, e-mails, MP3’s or other files including software and digitised newspaper and magazine articles." (Veale, 2003) By utilizing the phrase ‘gift economy’, digital anthropologists have consequently sought to explain how the Internet grew in its early years through the sharing of information" (Veale,2003). People create websites for others to gain knowledge from for free. That's what the gift economy is all about; gaining useful information that they can put to use.

Even then when the internet was not very popular there was a paper source where information was being shared wit society. Now that we have the internet people can communicate socially with one another through various websites such as facebook which is considered part of the gift economy. People can not only give information about stuff,share videos, and can also share photos, but they can also receive information about things. Facebook is a perfect example of gift economy. Myspace would also be considered part of the gift economy. I am very familiar with both myspace and facebook.

Myspace service began in August of 2003. Myspace is 100% owned division of publicly traded internet company eUniverse. The intentions of myspace was to be a social networking website which would offer an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos internationally. The very first myspace users were eUniverse employees. Their company held a contest to see which employee could sign up the most users. By September 7, 2007, there were over 200 million accounts. People are able to share information with each other. Unknown artist are able to put their music out there on the internet to bed heard and exposed by myspace users. E-mail subscribers have even put forth effort and time to breathe life into myspace.

According to wikipedia, shortly after launching MySpace, team member Chris DeWolfe in its first business plan suggested that they start charging a fee for the basic MySpace service. Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's Founder, Chairman, CEO) nixed Chris DeWolfe's idea, due to it being "totally not necessary, as many mindless youths and adults will donate money to us anyway".The eUniverse company was bought in July 2005 for $580 million approximately $327 million has been attributed to the value of MySpace according to the financial advisor fairness opinion.

It seems like the more users myspace has it seems like the more it advances. It used to be just where you can obtain music. Now you can put your own music and videos for viewers to view.
You can also view which of your friends are currently online, let people know what kind of a mood your in, etc.I feel its good to have a gift economy because if we didnt then where would people get all their good resourceful information from. I wouldn't probably known anything about this topic if it wasn't for the gift economy. The more people access and use these websites the more it will gain revenue for the creators to keep it up.