Sosial anthropology - Essay Example

Led by Wired, dot com boosters were claiming that the Net was creating the free market only found up to then in the neo classical economics text books. Inspired by post modernist gurus, new media activists were convinced that humanity would liberate itself from corporate control by escaping into cyber space (Barbrook, 2005) Jumping forward from the 1990s to the year 2008 the above quote seems true to both sides. On one hand we have seen a huge shift in the way that people consume with more and more people choosing to sell and buy over the world wide web, vast amounts of profits generated for companies like Google who enjoyed in the “1990s an estimated growth of 100% per year.

” (Coffman, K. G; Odlyzko, A. M. 1998) The internet market has continued to grow substantially year on year as technologies change and more and more parts of the world come on line. On the other hand, an extraordinary phenomena is taking place throughout the world which is almost totally contradictory to the doctrine of the free market and capitalism, and that is the culture of exchange and gift economy that is developing and becoming more possible through the use of the internet and social software.

A gift economy can be defined as a means in which goods and services are exchanged without there being an agreement of a reciprocal return to the giver. Most anthropological academics, however would agree, although there is no implicit need for a return gift there is often an expectation of reciprocity. Marcel Mauss in his classic work "The Gift1" argues that gifts are never free and that the act of giving creates a social bond that requires obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient.

This reciprocity however is not however solely between two people but between group, tribes and communities. Further studies challenge the idea that reciprocity is an inevitable outcome of exchange and focus on the classification of different types of reciprocity. For the purpose of