Assignment VII
Part I
• Using Camerer's writing as a foundation, describe the possible effects of public wish-lists on the signaling function of gifts.
Based on Camerer’s research on gift giving, there are many different ways to interpret gift giving and receiving. Inefficiency, cost, benefit, and symbolism are attached to all gifts with one or more taking priority depending on whether gifts are being exchanged by friends, partners, family, or business affiliates. In all instances giving gifts certainly send out signals. As Camerer noted, they signal wealth, intention, investment in relationships, feeling, care about the receiver, status, false ‘good-guy’ image to name a few. By publishing wish-lists many of these signals will be irrelevant and instead replaced by others.
Making your wish-list known to others is very common during Christmas or for weddings or letting your immediate family know what you want for a birthday. The signals in publicizing the wish-list are those of letting people know that you prefer to get meaningful and relevant gifts. Relevant gifts could be anything from a paper clip to a home, as long as it is something that the receiver indicates s/he wants. On the other hand, gift givers signal that they respect the receiver enough to give what is desired and not what they assume the receiver wants. Wish-lists are created because it is an easy and practical way to get things that you want, but may not be able to buy all the things within a limited time period. Christmas wish-lists are more for parents to know what their children want so that they don’t waste money getting them toys or games they never look at post Christmas. At weddings, the couples create wish-lists because they start a new life and conventionally need to start from scratch. This wish-list is dual purpose; it benefits the couple by not getting a 100 odd gifts that they may never use and benefits the givers by alleviating them from the effort of thinking what to give the couple.
However, in spite of all the practically good reasons for a wish-list it does remove the ‘sentimental’ and ‘special’ functions of gifts. Gifts from a wish-list to do not really signify an important quality about the giver or their meaning in the receivers life, although they can pick and choose according to their taste and meaningfulness from the list of items in the wish-list.
• Last week we looked at dating sites and identified some of the problems as people not knowing how others perceived them, not being able to sense "status" within the group (and thus not knowing who would be a reasonably likely match), deceptive self-presentation and lack of courtesy. Would any of these problems (or others) be adderssed by instituting a culture of gift giving within the site? If so, how and why would gifts help? How would you implement it? What would the disadvatages be?
My instinctive reply is negative. I do not think gifting should be made part of dating-websites because it might make deception easier. As of now, there is a lot of competition, if gifting is added as a feature competition might become so dominant it might weaken the chances of sincere people. In my opinion, the problems of deception would not be solved, instead it might open newer avenues for deception. Gifting does send out important signals but I think that a majority of gifts are given for superficial and formal reasons, because it is a convention to give gifts not because the giver really wants to. Not that genuine givers do not exist but it would be interesting to know if they are a majority and what situations or people prompt them to be genuine givers. People would get another chance to show off their wealth or ill-intentions by giving pervert gifts (if there are no restrictions). One situation could be where the giver buys the same item to give all the people s/he is communicating with, making the entire system quite meaningless. Some people love receiving costly gifts and might make a wrong selection based on the gift rather than the person.
People would spend more time, effort, and money in giving gifts to people, which may not return any benefits. Also, a few questions to be looked into are: how many people should the giver gift? what kind of gifts should one give? how much money should be spent? when should a gift be given? after how many rounds of communication should gifts be given? if the giver is talking to two or three people simultaneously to make the right choice should s/he invest in all of them? Should the gifts me efficient or inefficient ones? Etc. Another thought – are we talking about sending physical gifts to one another or digital ones. Digital gifts have even lesser meaning when it comes to the function of signals. It is devoid of personal touch although a good deal of thought might have gone into choosing the gift. That said, if the gifts are something like references or links to other informative websites that the receiver needs or digital videos or songs that the receiver wanted would be good ideas. Buying MP3s or subscribing to podcasts are not costly and can impress the receiver.
If gift giving had to be implemented, then it should be done only after the giver and receiver have decided to chose each other and see if they are the right match. Givers should not be allowed to give gifts to more than a certain number of people they are weighing. In addition, there should be a restriction as to what kind of gifts the giver gives. The receiver should certainly have the right to reject a gift if it is given too early in the relationship building process or is not an appropriate gift.
• Gifts often have a special presentation - the prototypical gift is wrapped and be-ribboned. What purpose does the wrapping serve? Is there a virtual equivalent? The "gifts" that Bergquist and Ljungberg describes are not specially demarcated as gifts - do you think that they are, indeed, gifts? Would clearly designating them as gifts change their function? How? How would you go about doing that?
Personally, I think wrapping is a waste of time for the giver when the receiver knows what the gift is or even expects a gift. However, unwrapping even the smallest of gifts gives the receiver a great feeling of surprise and something equivalent to the sweet pain of waiting. Some of us have no patience and rip out the wrapping, others of us recognize the labor and thought that went into the wrapping so open it carefully, and still others even save the wrapping. For instance, I never wrap gifts if I can avoid it, but a certain friend of mine always gives inexpensive and simple gifts with the most beautiful wrapping decorated with a tiny bunch of wild flowers or a small candy or something to make the gift look different and interesting. I treasure those wrappings even when the gifts are exhausted. This pleasure of wrapping or unwrapping maybe lost if the gift in question is a digital one.
Digital gifits are really more of help and information give out of the goodness of your heart and I think that many people participate in open source not because of the benefits it gives the others but because of their own benefits. Participating in open source systems boosts their own egos, they earn a name for themselves, it also enhances their own learning, and it is looked upon as a “cool” thing to do. Everyone uses Wikipedia, but the contributors pride themselves about being contributors. However, I am sure that there are people who contribute information for genuinely spreading correct information among others. A wrapping of sorts that these people probably use are those of gradually revealing their capabilities and providing information one piece at a time. Designing websites where the users have to navigate through interesting channels and consequentially gain information could be one sort of wrapping for digital gifts.
I am not so sure I think digital “gifts” should be demarcated as gifts. Who would you be giving the gift to? - the rest of the world or to some big corporation? It might not change the activities of contributing and providing information but might confuse the contributors about the goal of the endeavor, why they are doing it, how long or how much should they contribute, or if they have started contributing can they stop without facing any consequences.
• Using Camerer's writing as a foundation, describe the possible effects of public wish-lists on the signaling function of gifts.
Based on Camerer’s research on gift giving, there are many different ways to interpret gift giving and receiving. Inefficiency, cost, benefit, and symbolism are attached to all gifts with one or more taking priority depending on whether gifts are being exchanged by friends, partners, family, or business affiliates. In all instances giving gifts certainly send out signals. As Camerer noted, they signal wealth, intention, investment in relationships, feeling, care about the receiver, status, false ‘good-guy’ image to name a few. By publishing wish-lists many of these signals will be irrelevant and instead replaced by others.
Making your wish-list known to others is very common during Christmas or for weddings or letting your immediate family know what you want for a birthday. The signals in publicizing the wish-list are those of letting people know that you prefer to get meaningful and relevant gifts. Relevant gifts could be anything from a paper clip to a home, as long as it is something that the receiver indicates s/he wants. On the other hand, gift givers signal that they respect the receiver enough to give what is desired and not what they assume the receiver wants. Wish-lists are created because it is an easy and practical way to get things that you want, but may not be able to buy all the things within a limited time period. Christmas wish-lists are more for parents to know what their children want so that they don’t waste money getting them toys or games they never look at post Christmas. At weddings, the couples create wish-lists because they start a new life and conventionally need to start from scratch. This wish-list is dual purpose; it benefits the couple by not getting a 100 odd gifts that they may never use and benefits the givers by alleviating them from the effort of thinking what to give the couple.
However, in spite of all the practically good reasons for a wish-list it does remove the ‘sentimental’ and ‘special’ functions of gifts. Gifts from a wish-list to do not really signify an important quality about the giver or their meaning in the receivers life, although they can pick and choose according to their taste and meaningfulness from the list of items in the wish-list.
• Last week we looked at dating sites and identified some of the problems as people not knowing how others perceived them, not being able to sense "status" within the group (and thus not knowing who would be a reasonably likely match), deceptive self-presentation and lack of courtesy. Would any of these problems (or others) be adderssed by instituting a culture of gift giving within the site? If so, how and why would gifts help? How would you implement it? What would the disadvatages be?
My instinctive reply is negative. I do not think gifting should be made part of dating-websites because it might make deception easier. As of now, there is a lot of competition, if gifting is added as a feature competition might become so dominant it might weaken the chances of sincere people. In my opinion, the problems of deception would not be solved, instead it might open newer avenues for deception. Gifting does send out important signals but I think that a majority of gifts are given for superficial and formal reasons, because it is a convention to give gifts not because the giver really wants to. Not that genuine givers do not exist but it would be interesting to know if they are a majority and what situations or people prompt them to be genuine givers. People would get another chance to show off their wealth or ill-intentions by giving pervert gifts (if there are no restrictions). One situation could be where the giver buys the same item to give all the people s/he is communicating with, making the entire system quite meaningless. Some people love receiving costly gifts and might make a wrong selection based on the gift rather than the person.
People would spend more time, effort, and money in giving gifts to people, which may not return any benefits. Also, a few questions to be looked into are: how many people should the giver gift? what kind of gifts should one give? how much money should be spent? when should a gift be given? after how many rounds of communication should gifts be given? if the giver is talking to two or three people simultaneously to make the right choice should s/he invest in all of them? Should the gifts me efficient or inefficient ones? Etc. Another thought – are we talking about sending physical gifts to one another or digital ones. Digital gifts have even lesser meaning when it comes to the function of signals. It is devoid of personal touch although a good deal of thought might have gone into choosing the gift. That said, if the gifts are something like references or links to other informative websites that the receiver needs or digital videos or songs that the receiver wanted would be good ideas. Buying MP3s or subscribing to podcasts are not costly and can impress the receiver.
If gift giving had to be implemented, then it should be done only after the giver and receiver have decided to chose each other and see if they are the right match. Givers should not be allowed to give gifts to more than a certain number of people they are weighing. In addition, there should be a restriction as to what kind of gifts the giver gives. The receiver should certainly have the right to reject a gift if it is given too early in the relationship building process or is not an appropriate gift.
• Gifts often have a special presentation - the prototypical gift is wrapped and be-ribboned. What purpose does the wrapping serve? Is there a virtual equivalent? The "gifts" that Bergquist and Ljungberg describes are not specially demarcated as gifts - do you think that they are, indeed, gifts? Would clearly designating them as gifts change their function? How? How would you go about doing that?
Personally, I think wrapping is a waste of time for the giver when the receiver knows what the gift is or even expects a gift. However, unwrapping even the smallest of gifts gives the receiver a great feeling of surprise and something equivalent to the sweet pain of waiting. Some of us have no patience and rip out the wrapping, others of us recognize the labor and thought that went into the wrapping so open it carefully, and still others even save the wrapping. For instance, I never wrap gifts if I can avoid it, but a certain friend of mine always gives inexpensive and simple gifts with the most beautiful wrapping decorated with a tiny bunch of wild flowers or a small candy or something to make the gift look different and interesting. I treasure those wrappings even when the gifts are exhausted. This pleasure of wrapping or unwrapping maybe lost if the gift in question is a digital one.
Digital gifits are really more of help and information give out of the goodness of your heart and I think that many people participate in open source not because of the benefits it gives the others but because of their own benefits. Participating in open source systems boosts their own egos, they earn a name for themselves, it also enhances their own learning, and it is looked upon as a “cool” thing to do. Everyone uses Wikipedia, but the contributors pride themselves about being contributors. However, I am sure that there are people who contribute information for genuinely spreading correct information among others. A wrapping of sorts that these people probably use are those of gradually revealing their capabilities and providing information one piece at a time. Designing websites where the users have to navigate through interesting channels and consequentially gain information could be one sort of wrapping for digital gifts.
I am not so sure I think digital “gifts” should be demarcated as gifts. Who would you be giving the gift to? - the rest of the world or to some big corporation? It might not change the activities of contributing and providing information but might confuse the contributors about the goal of the endeavor, why they are doing it, how long or how much should they contribute, or if they have started contributing can they stop without facing any consequences.
posted by Pal at 6:16 AM
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