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Nothing says “I care about you” in today’s day and age quite like a 25-dollar Venmo transfer with a balloon emoji. It is quick and convenient, but about as personal as paying back someone for a take-out order.
Somewhere between Instagram notifications and Amazon gift cards, we’ve forgotten the art of giving. What was once a mark of intimacy, memory and effort is now relegated to digitized efficiency. Before diving into Venmo transfers and gift cards, it is worth asking: what does gifting mean in a social context?
French sociologist Marcel Mauss, in his 1925 “Essay on the Gift,” points to a central idea of obligation in gift giving. He argues that gift giving involves three obligations: to give, to receive and to reciprocate. This means that the effort we put into giving also places an obligation on the recipient to return the gesture, creating a constant cycle of gifts and counter-gifts that help us sustain social relationships.
In the social landscape, giving is an act of remembering someone, carving out time for them and attaching meaning to material possessions. This is precisely why digital gifts like gift cards seem impersonal. They affirm the first two categories of remembrance and taking out time for someone, but the meaning they hold seems hollow. It’s probably a testament to the relationship you hold with that person but the very fact that you consider a person worthy of receiving a gift from you should rule out this aspect of impersonality.
If we are to accept the Maussian cycle of gifting, then we mustn’t look at it purely through the logic of mutual accounting. Sure, the material reality, which I will address later, does play a role in the act of giving. However, it shouldn’t take priority over other aspects like the effort of one’s emotional labor.
Giving someone something on their birthday or some other occasion demands a special recognition of what that individual means to us. A gift must include a narrative story of someone such as giving someone a first edition vinyl record of their favorite album. Now, this includes the negotiation that one has with themselves of the receiver having said vinyl in the first place, and them valuing it instead of letting it sit around in their apartment. If these social conditions are met, then we enter the sweet spot of gift giving.
This is where that record transforms from being just music to them remembering the first time they heard that band, why they appreciated it in the first place. It touches them in a very personal space, as music often tends to be. They now probably associate part of that record with the person who gave them that gift. This act doesn’t just reaffirm their relationship but also appeals to the story of the person receiving the gift.
An appeal to narrative is often missed in digital gifts. It collapses this opportunity of being part of someone’s story into a financial transaction, making it indistinguishable from splitting a restaurant bill. Similarly, in the case of gift cards, the labor of choice is outsourced to the recipient. This fails to stand up to the idea of meaningful reciprocity: the sense that someone went out of their way to imagine your joy, not just your convenience.
It would be unfair to talk about digital gifts without understanding their appeal. One’s ability to give is contingent on two main factors: generosity and thought. For instance, curated boutique gifts often demand money, and handmade gifts require free time. In our case, as college students, when almost everyone is overworked and underpaid, impersonal digital gifts emerge as a survival mechanism of sorts. They provide us a way to meet the social obligation of giving a gift without sacrificing a lot of time or money. The personal touch necessary for a thoughtful gift requires labor, and labor is costly.
So, what is the alternative? Last weekend, I paid a visit to the Bloomington Antique Mall. For someone who thinks he was born in the wrong generation, the mall was like a treasure chest of items I had discovered after a long expedition: an expedition of precisely two years, given my ignorance of the existence of this place in our town.
During my visit, I found a poetry book whose spine had been lovingly painted with a cute, cracked vase toward the bottom. Among the Zara and Ralph Lauren sweatshirts was an old prickly sweater, probably handwoven with care by someone’s grandmother. These items not only suggested who had owned them before, but also how they were used, cherished and then finally neglected. It struck me that gifting someone else one of those items at the mall would mean an invitation to a story, a memory and a fragment of history that the relationship could cherish.
For students and young people like me, who are constantly negotiating the limits of time and money, these finds at the antique mall offered a sweet spot of affordable and personal gifts that transcend the digital conveyor belt of gift cards and Venmo transfers. This intertwines the labor of giving with the labor of imagining, remembering and caring — something that digital gifts bypass.
Advait Save (he/him) is a junior studying economics and sociology.
