Virtual communities today are ‘communities’ because social bonds have sprouted up around a ‘gift economy’ of open information exchange. Even the word ‘community’ itself (deriving from the Latin “to give among each other”) reveals the key relationship between gift exchanges and community building. Just as traditional communities have unwittingly suffered from the competition-inducing process built in to our ‘normal’ national currencies , communities on the Net similarly may be torn apart if the new payment systems developed for the Internet rely exclusively on these types of currencies.
A recent survey on values and priorities in the US has revealed that an astounding 83% feel that our top priority should be to “develop and heal our communities”. While most people appear to recognize the importance of healing communities, few seem to understand exactly where the rifts dividing us came from – or what to do about them. Even some of the people who created virtual communities have not always been aware that the secret of their success relates to the fact that they had created a ‘gift economy’ on the Net. “I’ll help you today, and someone else will help me if needed some other day” has been the common pattern in the spaces wherever successful virtual communities have sprung up.
As the Net becomes home to the growing number of commercial enterprises, those who value the Net as community space may want to take some precautions lest virtual communities meet the same fate as almost all the gift economies that preceded them. The time to become aware of this connection has come because all signs point to an imminent change in the way the Net will operate. For instance, Business Week’s ‘Special Report about Internet Communities’ (1). points out that “Today’s push is to turn the age-old appeal of community into cash”. And there seems to be little awareness either in business or on the Net that unless some precautions are taken in the way this is done, we may kill the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs, and virtual communities will simply disappear as have most traditional “primitive” communities operating on the basis of “gift economies”.