Facebook’s ‘Perfect Gift’
I wanted to share today some thoughts I had having read Carrier’s (1990) article. Charities may be used to exemplify or dispute the existence of a ‘perfect gift’, but they may also be used to question our notions of the ‘gift’ more generally.
Two weeks before your birthday, Facebook sends you a notification asking whether you’d like to set up a birthday fundraiser on your profile. You can choose whatever charity or cause you care about and Facebook will encourage your friends to donate to the chosen cause with the money they would have spent buying you a birthday gift. This is an interesting case study because there is a gift exchange between your friend (donator/gift-giver), the charity (recipient of donation) and yourself/birthday-person (subsidiary recipient and facilitator of the gift exchange). In giving one ‘gift’, the friend ends up gifting two ‘gifts’ in two different ways to two different recipients. Therefore, I question notions of the ‘perfect gift’, that a gift exchange between giver and recipient must be both simultaneously immaterial and unconstrained and unconstraining.
On the one hand, the money donated to the charity has no obligation to be reciprocated. The charity is under no obligation to even communicate with the giver in this case, indicating the unconstrained and unconstraining nature of the gift. The intention of the gift-giver, however, is not necessarily one of whole-hearted sentimentality towards the charity. The giver’s compassion and thoughtfulness, and therefore the immateriality of the gift, is instead directed at building a meaningful social relationship with you (the birthday person). The act of donating to a cause that you care about on behalf of you and your birthday shows the love and care the giver has for you through their act of gift-giving. Despite not being the ultimate recipient of the ‘gift’ (donation) then, you are still the recipient of an element of the ‘gift’.
Facebook’s ‘perfect gift’ goes to show that the bond between a gift-giver and gift-recipient can to some extent be separated from the gift itself. We can therefore think about the ways in which the qualities of a ‘perfect gift’ (immaterial, unconstrained and unconstraining) can be realised in unexpected ways. Rather than restricting our thought to bilateral gift exchanges, we should consider how multiple stakeholders in a gift exchange can alter the nature of the ‘perfect gift’ and the process by which it is gifted.
Contributed by JasmineAlexander on 21/01/2022
