chosen to overlook the use of their material in exchange for the work fans perform in testing markets and educating potential customers. According to this fandom’s moral economy, fansubs circulate when a show is unavailable commercially in their market, but fans often withdraw unauthorized copies voluntarily when titles secure commercial distribution (Leonard 2005). Mizuko Ito (2012) notes further that fans who actively participate in fansubbing refer to those who do not contribute to the community as “leechers,” an expression that signals the perceived obligations fans have toward each other to provide value within this informal cultural economy.
It’s crucial to realize that audiences and producers often follow different logics and operate within different economies (if, by “economies,” we mean different systems of appraising and allocating value). Painting in broad strokes, we might describe these two worlds as “commodity culture” and “the gift economy.” One (commodity culture) places greater emphasis on economic motives, the other (the gift economy) on social motives.
Certainly, most of us who have grown up in capitalist economies understand the set of expectations surrounding the buying and selling of goods. Yet we all also operate in another social order that involves the giving and accepting of gifts and favors. Within commodity culture, sharing content may be viewed as economically damaging; in the informal gift economy, by contrast, the failure to share material is socially damaging. We do not mean to imply that these cultures are totally autonomous; rather, at the current moment, they are complexly interwoven in ways both mundane and profound. All of us, from the poorest individual to the hugely profitable conglomerate, operate within an economic context of capitalism. And, at the same time, Web 2.0 companies—and neoliberal economics more generally—seek to integrate the social and economic in ways that make it hard to distinguish between them.
A “barn raising” might be considered a classic example of the social exchange of labor. In this nineteenth-century social ritual, established members of a community gathered to welcome newcomers and help them establish a homestead. The labor involved in a barn raising is productive, contributing real value to the new community member. However, it is also expressive, signaling the community’s embrace. Since barn raisings are recurring rituals, the value created through this labor gets passed forward to future arrivals, and thus, participation is a kind of social obligation, a repayment of contributions that earlier community members had made toward one’s own well-being. Social bonding takes place as the newcomer works side-by-side with other community members for common ends. Participants accept the unequal exchange of value through labor involved in the barn raising because the process knits the newcomer into the system of reciprocity on which the community depends for its survival. The message of the barn raising is that the community benefits when each member’s economic needs are protected.
Insert commercial logic into any aspect of a barn raising, and we alter the meaning of these transactions, creating discomfort for participants. Suppose the newcomers refused to join in on the work, seeing their neighbors’ labor as an entitlement for purchasing land in the area. Suppose the newcomers turned the productive labor into a public spectacle, charging admission for outsiders to watch the construction. Suppose the newcomers sought to sell parts of the barn to various community members, charging rents for the areas their neighbors were developing. Suppose they sold outside economic interests the rights to sell snacks and drinks to those who were laboring or sold information about their neighbors which would give these outside interests advantages in future economic exchanges. Or suppose they were to seek to use their neighbors’ labor to complete other tasks around their property or else to use the barn, once completed, for radically different purposes than the community perceived (for the sake of argument, let’s say to house a brothel). Each of these alterations would violate the spirit of the barn-raising ritual, making it less about the community’s efforts to promote its mutual well-being and more about exploiting the economic opportunities that arise as a consequence of the neighbors’ labor. Any newcomer who adopted such practices would not be welcome in the community for long, and the practice of raising barns would grind to a halt.
As absurd as such exploitative arrangements seem in the context of a barn raising, they are taken for granted in the Web 2.0 model, as companies generate revenue through monetizing the attention created by user-generated content. Web 2.0 business practices inevitably involve the exchange of labor. However, this labor may or may not be freely given. It may or may not be motivated by the desire to serve the collective interests of the participating community. It may or may not be viewed as a gift that creates obligations and encourages reciprocity. And participants may or may not benefit in intangible ways (such as enhancing their reputation or advancing their “brand”) from their participation. Over time, tapping free labor for economic profit can turn playful participation into alienated work. Insofar as the terms of this transaction are not transparent or are not subject to negotiation with all participants, they corrode the moral economy.
The concept of the gift economy has its origins in classic anthropology, dating back to Marcel Mauss’s 1922 book The Gift ([1922] 1990). There are substantial differences between the communities Mauss describes as organized entirely around gift exchanges and the digital cultures we are examining here, imbricated as they are into capitalist logics. As such, we can’t simply map one onto the other. The concept of the gift economy, however, has been adopted by digital theorists as a helpful way to explain contemporary practices, in which “the gift economy” functions as an analogy for the informal and socially based exchanges which characterize some aspects of the digital ethos.
Howard Rheingold’s 1993 book The Virtual Community, for instance, mentions the gift economy as central to relationships across the online world. Describing information as the web’s most valuable “currency,” Rheingold argues that the generalized spread of knowledge is one way of giving back to the larger community, suggesting, “When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions” (59). Richard Barbrook (1998), another early cybertheorist, argues that “network communities are […] formed through mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas,” practices that actually superseded commodity culture in the priorities of those who were the first to form online communities.
The early web was dominated by the ethos of the science community and a mindset in which researchers were obliged to address each other’s questions when they had relevant information to share. Rheingold describes this ethos less as a tit-for-tat exchange of value than as part of a larger reputation system in which one’s contributions are ultimately recognized and respected, even if there is no direct and explicit negotiation of worth at the time someone contributes. Companies were relative latecomers to the web, even though they now enjoy a dominant presence online. As commercial values have spread into the web, though, they have had to negotiate with the older web ethos.
That said, as anthropologist Igor Kopytoff (1986) reminds us, there remains a great deal of permeability in the relations between commodity and gift economies—especially within complex societies. The distinction between gifts and commodities does not describe their essence. Kopytoff explains, “The same thing may be treated as a commodity at one time and not another. […] The same thing may, at the same time, be seen as a commodity by one person and as something else by another. Such shifts and differences in whether and when a thing is a commodity reveal a moral economy that stands behind the objective economy of visible transactions” (1986, 64). Kopytoff understands commodification to be a “cultural and cognitive process” which shapes our understanding of the objects we exchange with each other (64). Though we idealize “gifts of the heart” and “labors of love,” most gifts these days are manufactured and store bought. There is often a magic moment when we remove the price tag from what we purchased and transform it from a commodity to a gift. People do not necessarily fear that gifts’ origins as commodities diminish the sentiments expressed through their exchange, though such exchanges may never fully escape the tendency to appraise gifts at least in part on the basis of what was spent on them. Conversely, as companies talk about their desire to build “relationships” with their audiences, their transactions will be judged—at least in part—on the basis of the norms
