In order to lend credibility to our design we need to show its economic viability. Viability itself can be variously interpreted; a minimal requirement is to show that it is financially sustainable, that sufficient revenue may be generated. However, given uncertainties of the purely monetary approaches, the achievement of sustainability requires broader considerations. So we seek views and theories that present economics as a holistic ecosystem that recognises the full extent to which services operate beyond the standard confines of the financial and business sectors. It’s into such an environment that we can then embed our design and show how its economic model will operate.

Macro views – commonly espoused in the language of global markets – have tended to hold sway in recent decades and are reflected in many SNS strategies. Here, for Sigala, we allow our attention to dwell on the micro, as well as the macro, by developing an economic model for SNS that identifies the full scope of and elaborates in detail on transaction. It does so by taking account of exchanges that are personal, impersonal and, further, neither personal nor impersonal, which we call trans-personal. We shall define what we mean by these terms, but it may be observed that the business model of most well-known SNS operate are driven by impersonal transactions, hence the importance given to aggregate data and hence the talk of markets.

Despite the rhetoric of some CEOs, invariably this environment has strongly constrained the design of SNS to ensure monetary returns. It has in the process affected the user interface by marginalising one-to-one personal interaction by inserting more content aggregation through newsfeeds, timelines, and so forth, with supporting functionality such as data mining. This is arguably more oriented to the advertisers than the individual seeking meaningful personal interaction. Companies are deemed ‘successful’ if they increase numbers and companies that play to the markets are obliged to deliver these numerical increases. Yet this way of working has both in financial and more serious economic terms come under immense strain and questions have been raised about its long-term viability and hence sustainability. With the boom and bust cycles still looming around technology stocks, dependence on such a system is thus a substantial risk.

So we propose a broader approach, drawing heavily on the work of Avner Offer, who as an economic historian has spent decades studying social well-being in the United States and the UK covering the decades of redevelopment following the end of the Second World War. Much of this work has been consolidated in the publication of his book, The Challenge of Affluence1. With such a background, Offer is able to develop insightful analysis of people’s welfare precisely informed by data on people’s material wealth and key indicators of especially family well-being. Since well-being has been so closely bound to especially material possessions, his empirical findings are striking as they tend to show in many cases that an increase in material wealth is correlated with an increase in social problems. So a dependence on market-based economics is not by itself a recipe for happiness – what’s needed is hinted in the book’s subtitle: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950.

We focus especially on one theory, the economy of regard, expounded in Chapter 5, in which Offer argues for a broadening of the analysis of economic exchange; the title of his original monograph is already good indication for this: Between the gift and the market: the economy of regard2. There is a continuum; at one end lies the personal transaction, in the gift, and at the other end is the impersonal transaction in the market; and in between there is by implication a mixture. The whole continuum is based on the concept of regard, a subtle concept that makes amenable the analysis of many types of exchange; it is a key mechanism operating in one-one relationships, especially when it comes to transaction; and it affirms especially the smaller-scale economics that exists outside market forces. Offer’s treatment shows how regard makes fundamental connections between personal conduct and the wider economy.

Having given notice of the approach we intend to adopt, next we provide elements of the abstract framework before describing Offer’s theory in more detail and how Sigala may be related to it. Our analysis will follow the example of the initial paper that inspired this work by providing cultural responses from a Buddhist perspective, to show especially how non-secular views lead to distinctive design considerations. Afterwards we provide some scrutiny with practical considerations and basic questions (5.4).

Next: salient features.

Notes

1 Offer, Avner. 2006. The Challenge of Affluence, Oxford University Press.

2 Offer, Avner. 1997. Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard, Economic History Review, 50 (3). pp. 450-476 https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/economics/history/Paper3/gift3.pdf