The gift experiences in on line collaboration, sharing and solidarity-based practices

Abstract

The ancient gift-giving practice shows – still today – its pervasiveness, though it adopts tools and modes of our communicative contexts.

Starting from the assumption that «Media are everywhere. We are media» (Eugeni, 2015, p. 28), the following essay is aimed at pointing out examples of altruism towards strangers within online environments of social media.

The disenchanted Homo digitalis shows, more and more, his inner need of engaging himself in practices of gift-giving, sharing friendship, time, mutual help, know-how, personal experiences, to create communities made up of free of charge ties and authentic empathy. More specifically, collaborative crowd-science projects, examples of online solidarity-based practises as well as the well-known act of sharing knowledge and/or information represent the main ?social faces? of the gift, analysed throughout this article.

Finally, once recognized the current importance of the gift relationship within the online communities, the essay refuses the old-fashioned opposition between homo oeconomicus versus homo reciprocus, and it emphasises the contemporary homo digitalis’s extraordinary capabilities of sharing, soci-ability and altruism as a whole.