goodmachine

Hi! Welcome to the rainforest.

Today we're going to talk about tropical birds, and one especially interesting bird in particular. Then, somehow, we'll get into gift-giving in social networks. Stick with me, it'll be fun.

This post is partly inspired by @ivanovitch's recent thoughts on why "viral" marketing is both a vexatious and fundamentally wrong-footed way to think about messaging, and why we need to get over it, pronto. To paraphrase his starting point: instead thinking "viral" and of trying to "infect" people with whatever your idea is, why not consider instead why people choose to share things that interest them?

This is potentially important stuff, and goes well beyond the marketing dept's natural desire to feel a bit more like the Tooth Fairy, flitting from pillow to pillow with love, and a bit less like a germ-warfare technician, concocting infection with a sneer.

By looking at actual motives, genuine volition over imaginary compulsion, we might develop some thoughts on how unpeople like brands get to play, or not. (Although you're going to have to wait for Pt. 2 for a proper bit on brands, and Pt. 3 for how games leverage gifts, and the immense importance thereof).

For now I want to look at the smallest possible gifts - links - as the magnetic force that holds together of networks of people.

Back in the jungle, an awesome sight awaits

Tropical birds are the teenage millionaires, the creative bohemians of the animal kingdom. I mean, look at this guy:

Because I'm worth it

Raised in a world of superabundant variety, dining exclusively on tasty dew-kissed grubs and luminous nectar, the local residents haven't had much real work to do for the past 18 billion years, other than to peck at interesting holes and evolve wildly.

It's a good life, you might say.

Yes: they've devised iridescent uniforms, learnt crazily ornate dances, sport nifty ultraviolet feet. Each individual is apparently some kind of insanely concentrated orgy of sexual communication. With feathers on. Just look at them demanding you look at them.

But the male bower bird is prince of all.

Not in this case because he's an especially snappy dresser (like his colleagues) but because he's a magnificent communicator.

This is his strategy: he finds, hoards and displays interesting objects from the forest. He weaves a nest of twigs and roots at ground level, cunningly shaped to so as amplify his voice when he's inside it, hooting away. And then, having laid out a dozen or so curious, interesting finds (ultrablue beetle-shells in little pyramids, balls of deer crap arrayed in lines, dabs of red fungus in artful rows) he sings a bower-amplified song, and waits for the ladies.

The campaign has begun:

Hey that's like me

Human beings, and lately the digital, social-network kind (homo clickiensis) obviously have a tremendous amount in common with bower birds, both male and female.

What are links, if not edible tokens of speculative love?

What are retweets, if not the new shy glances?

How do we look for new mates? By their song - by the shape, colour and velocity of their various interests, streamed out in realtime as a bunch of social objects, for curious beaks.

Everything we post, retweet, or link to, is simply a gift.

And this is not merely a person-to-person, or person-to-clan gift, but a gift that makes the network work.

Networks are made of this

Gift-giving (even and especially gifts to strangers) is central to creating the network, which (all technology briefly ignored) is made of bottled love and deferred obligation (altruism is a kind of reputation bank) but is also a military parade for marks of the tribe, a display of gentle inter-species hatred and in-species competition.

Competition (and her hairy-handed grandsons Conflict, Fear, Loathing etc) are, it turns out, as vital to forming all kinds of communities as mere tokens of love and symbols of groupishness, even when the competition is strictly for attention, instead of land. More on the unspeakable joy and social utility of clan war here.

Digression: Note on Google

Note that Google is seldom seen as being at the forefront of any kind of social anything: but this is wrong. Google was (and is) implicitly social at the core: PageRank fundamentally leverages social intelligence, because humans are the ones that linked web pages together, for social reasons, beyond simple utility. We made the web; they just drew the map, or lately, the graph.

Social search has been (implicitly) a basic part of web infrastructure for some time now (the realtime and explicitly social web is just a little amplification, a mere nicety, if you wanted to push the argument) as we moved one generation beyond keywords. Gifts are not an interesting but peripheral sideshow, a minor part of web culture: gifts are part of who we are - gifts matter. Ask Google.

Symbols

So for now, the giftiness, as distinct from whatever the gift actually happens to be, aka the symbolic value, is the thing.

This goes beyond merely phatic ("Wazz'up?") communications which description leaves out two things: firstly the intentional flavour of a gift, and secondly, the persistent and actionable characteristics of gifts given online (a link left in a public forum doesn't just vanish). So my identity is not described by my network, but what I add to it: the sum of gifts given.

And symbolic gifts create symbolic debt. Reciprocity (you share with me on the tacit understanding that I'll share with you) is very much implied in any "donation" as anthropologists and game theorists have long shown. This is how reciprocity-clubs, or groups of local interest are made ("parochial altruistic structures" in the jargon, like families, clans, or healthy businesses, even) and in which the parish is the online world.

When digital gift-giving is the peer-peer easy, anonymous, online, unbranded, inexhaustible, more-or-less weightless I'll-just-leave-this-here (one-to-any-number) kind, the display aspects of this gift are even more critical, even more like our pal the bower bird.

Note on brands

So when the market gets involved in playing gift-games, and brands step in loaded with entertainment as wampum, we see plainly how symbolic value is bound to get snarled up, and brands' pretense of having genuine wants - as opposed to needs - looks very much at its thinnest. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why brands can have fans, followers, and fanatics... but not friends.

Back to the forest

... and the awesomely disorganised communal sing-song.

Birdsong, I'm pretty sure, is universally acknowledged as the most joyous sound on Earth. It's the anthem, the flag, the very emblem of Nature's grand design. Unless you're a bird that is; in which case we can assume it's mostly just ads.

Further Reading

Excerpt from Mauss, The Gift [PDF]