Inalienability: understanding digital gifts

Spence, Jocelyn

Abstract

This paper takes on one of the rarely articulated yet important questions pertaining to digital media objects: how do HCI and design researchers understand 'gifting' when the object can just as easily be 'shared'? This question has often been implied and occasionally answered, though only partially. We propose the concept of 'inalienability', taken from the gifting literature, as a useful theory for clarifying what design researchers mean by gifting in a digital context. We apply 'inalienability' to three papers from the ACM Digital Library and one ongoing project, spanning nearly two decades of HCI and design research, that combine 'gifting and 'shar-ing' in their frameworks. In this way we show how applying the concept of 'inalienability' can clarify behaviours that mark gifting as a unique activity, frame research questions around gifting and sharing, outline specific next steps for gifting research, and suggest design strategies in this area.

Citation

Spence, J. (2019). Inalienability: understanding digital gifts. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, UK. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.+3300887

• Conference Name: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Start Date: May 4, 2019
• End Date: May 9, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Jan 7, 2019
• Online Publication Date: May 4, 2019
• Publication Date: May 4, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jan 28, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 5, 2019
• Journal: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019)
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Book Title: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, UK
• ISBN: 9781450359702
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.+3300887
• Keywords: gifting; inalienability; sharing; strong concepts
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1469852
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3300887
• Additional Information: Published in: Proceeding CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems; Paper No. 657. Glasgow, Scotland Uk — May 04 - 09, 2019 ACM : New York, USA ©2019 ISBN: 978-1-4503-5970-2 doi>10.1145/3290605.3300887; ; © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.; This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland Uk, https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605. 3300887.