Qotw4" Is gift economy blessing or curse to our world?"

A gift economy is something that we share information and advice to each other, techincal support on the Internet. " While gift giving as classically defined certainly occurs in the Internet(e.g colleagues e-mailing each other useful infromation),much of help and sharing that occurs in actually different than traditional gift"(Kollock , 1999). When people pass on free advice or offer useful information, the recepit is often unknown to them and the giver may never encounter the recepit again. For example, if the information is posted on a World Wide Web page , the infromation may be offered to an unknown set of recipients.



Ecommerce is also known as a gift economy

Global competition has spur companies to be more efficient in every department. Despite the fact that distribution process is one of the most important fundamentals to a business' success, it has always been overlooked. However, in the 1990s, the sudden appearance of e-commerce (a development brought by a convergence of EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), Internet, e-mail, and the www), has transformed the traditional distribution system (a systems depended heavily on warehouses to store components and products and from which deliveries were made to customers on an infrequent basis. It is expensive because large amount of capitals would have been tied up in large inventories. On top of this, the warehouse is often a source of waste in terms of faulty products that were not discovered until they came to be put into use) However, "E commerce consists primarily of the distributing, buying, selling, marketing and servicing of products or sevices over electronic system such as the Internet and other computer network" (wikipedia,2006). E-commerce has the same regualtion as gift economy which allowes the consumer to share and post their views on the product. They can exchange the information and ideas freely on the website. However, Ecommerce is more than a gift economy. "The information technology industry might see e- commerece as an electroinc business application aimed at commercial transactions; in this context, it can involve electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, e-marketing, online marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), automated inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems" (wekipedia, 2006 ).Today e-commerce is dominated by B2B and B2C. Roughly 80% of all e-commerce transactions are B2B. B2B is a system that allows transaction between businesses, for instance Ford to their retailers. Covisint, developed by Ford and GM is one such example. B2C, on the other hand, is simply the selling of consumer products and services directly over the internet by some form of web-based firm. The best example is probably Amazon and Dell.


Certainly, there were some doubts for the future of traditional retailers. However, for those that actually embraced the e-commerce wave, they actually found new ways to add value to their business. Some traditional intermediaries have adapted to the new situation in the form of logistics, information or financial services providers, and new intermediaries have also involved with e-commerce: infomediaries

The perception that all traditional intermediary organisations would be replace by the new technological forms is an illusion. There are several ways of fulfilling an e-commerce orders, and one the few prevailing ones, "brick and mortar model", actually combines both the conventional retail stores, fed by distribution centres, with an internet website that channels orders to the same distribution centres. Indeed, gift economy gives blessing to this world.

The Gift Economy makes a huge marjor changes in world economy. Infact it makes the world become very competitive



I believe that wtih the advent of internet , innovation of gift econmy , the world is becoming more interconected. Infact, there is a huge major changes in world economy. Since, everyone can access the online information , most of the compaines outsource where the labor charges are very cheap. The availability of cheap telecommunications is driving the services sector. Consequently, corporate capitalism is now spreading quickly to China, India and Russia where factory workers, engineers and software developers are paid a fraction of what their American counterparts earned. Telemarketing, accounting, engineering, R&D, and especially computer programming and data management will continue to be outsourced, primarily to India where English is commonly spoken. Beside that, offshoring to China (where the labor and infrastructure cost is much lower than that of developed nations) will continue. These offshoring and FDI has greatly elevated China's economic status. Long gone are the days when one can do simple coding, or prepare tax returns as daily jobs in America or other developed nations. All these grunt work will be outsourced to India or some other countries where it can be done more cheaply and efficiently. People in the developed countries, should instead look into providing or designing creative complex strategies, like tax avoidance or tax sheltering, or managing customer relationship, where higher level thinking and experience are required. These may seem bad news for employees




This improvement of gift economy is not good for everyone, like traditional retailers in ecommerce, the undereducated and those whose talents are not now in demand are losing ground.However, as I mentioned above, " brick and mortar models of combining traditional retailers and internet website in distribution channels .And if we look from a bird eye view, this is done to make our economy leaner and ensure that the best people get the best jobs; all in the spirit of free market economy.


Reference

Kollock, Peter (1999). The Economies of Online Cooperation; Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace. Communities in Cybrespace. Retrieved February 10, 2007 from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm


Dicken,Peter(2003)Global Shift, 4th Edition , chapter 4 ,Technology, the Engine of Change


Wikipedia: Electronic commerce(2006, July). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 10, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia/E-commerce