There’s No Gift Economy Without Giving

[Ken Freedman at Open Ed 2009] 

I was excited to hear Ken Freedman discuss the idea of the gift economy in his Open Education 2009 Keynote. Freedman cited gift economics as a fundamental mechanism driving the ongoing transformation of legendary WFMU from a free-form radio station operating in the traditional mode to a modern-day web media entity that works in the contemporary environment where so many other fail… all the while not only retaining, but enhancing, the station’s unique identity and philosophy.

In The Gift (perhaps the single greatest influence on my understanding—such as it is—of art and creativity), Lewis Hyde shares an insight that is at once obvious and profound w/r/t gifts and gift economies: a gift is no such thing unless the recipient can in turn give it away. This characteristic differentiates giving a gift from merely passing something to someone else and also from an exchange or transfer that incurs a debt, even if one that is implicit and possibly protracted.

Implied by this is the necessity of understanding what one has in order to have the ability to share it with someone else. Otherwise it’s like having a (possibly elaborately wrapped and decorated) box with unknown contents. You can hand the box off to someone else, but without knowing what it is you are sharing nothing. And from this we can derive that the knowledge and understanding that I must possess to give a gift must also be present in the recipient else they can’t share it and, again, no gift has been given.

The layers that comprise this simple concept of the gift are, I think, at the heart of the discussions happening about open education, open education resources, and content. In creating content we are creating an essential stuff, but the quest for bringing to this wealth of content a sense of context and process is the transformative activity that makes the content resources shareable at all. There’s no gift economy without gifts, naturally, which means actually giving rather than merely transferring content…

Tagged as: gift economy, gifts, open education, opened09