Affected communities, the ordinary and the expanded gift

Abstract

The article investigates the relationship between technology and ordinary goods in order to propose a new valence for the ordinary. The new ordinary should be understood as a gift economy that witnesses, within every new cycle of asymmetrical relations, the rise of a matter that regards a community of shared affections, or affected community. The expanded gift economy retains the conceptual productivity of Marcel Mauss’s famous theory about the gift, except that it is adapted to a world in which giver and receiver tend to remain anonymous, and the retribution expectations, undefined. At long last, the article argues for a notion of an expanded gift, whose reciprocity economy may - in a single gesture - make appear new forms of community and launch innovative social mobilization protocols.