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The Gift: chapter five – The Gift Community

August 5, 2004 By Uncategorized

Not quite done with The Gift yet, although definitely slowing down. Chapter five of the book deals with the community that is created by gifts and goes into some interesting detail about the scientific community and the implications of gift exchange on the free market. We’ll save the free market piece for the next post. Right now I want to focus on something Hyde says that has applicability in the blogging world.

Hyde takes the view that “gift exchange at the level of the group offers equilibrium and coherence, a kind of anarchist stability…[T]he conversion of gifts to commodities will have the effect of fragmenting the group or even destroying it.”

From here, Hyde details the circulation of ideas as gifts that brings coherence to the scientific community. When those ideas are converted into commodities, when scientists go to work for the private sector, or publish text books, it creates a shunning from the community. There is an implicit understanding that ideas are shared freely, at conferences, through journals and so on. All of this allows science to proceed toward the collective human goal of understanding the universe. And here, Hyde enters some interesting territory about the emergence of a group mind:

…[T]he task of assembling a mass of disparate facts into a coherent whole clearly lies beyond the powers of a single mind or even a single generation. All such broad intellectual undertakings call for a community of scholars, one in which each thinker can be awash in the ideas of his comrades so that a sort of “group mind” develops, one that is capable of cognitive tasks beyond the powers of any single person…A scientist may conduct his research in solitude, but he cannot do it in isolation. The ends of science require coordination. Each individual’s work must “fit,” and the synthetic nature of gift exchange makes it an appropriate medium for this integration; it is not just people that must be brought together but the ideas themselves.

This is such a concise and elegant description of why blogging matters. I’m discovering the power of this from the follow up for the Giving Conference, which benefited tremendously from Phil’s insistence that bloggers be a key target audience for the invitation. There were bloggers there (myself included) who know little of philanthropy, but whose engagement with the ideas presented at the conference have ensured that the story has continued to be told, refined and developed.

I cannot conceive of ever planning a conference like this again where bloggers were not invited to be the voices of diversity and story that emerge and continue the spirit of the gathering.

Bloggers offer immense gifts of time, reflection, engagement with each other’s ideas. My own thinking gets continually pushed and stretched by reading others and trying to respond to them. This quality of gift exchange provides a beautiful and powerful foundation for the community of people who share ideas freely on a myriad of subject areas. When bloggers form communities, it is around the cohesion of those who contribute to each other’s thinking.