Curious Case of monetary payments and its developments

The increased networking and social media exchanges are changing the dimensions how people interact and what drives them

Few days back when Corkd, a website that writes on wines, got hacked its owner Gary Vayner Chuk asked the Twitterverse (aka Web 2.0 world) for help but offering no money in return. And he ended up with lots of people offered help.

Its not a earth shattering instance, but how Gary's videocast is different and what it proves is that the role (or more precisely the importance) of money is shifting in the new media. The old driver of money seems to be carrying lesser sheen in online world, where the actual potential to earn is limitless: what you don’t have is friends; being a friend and being associated with something or somebody is / would be a main driver.

Old form of payments

Money used to be a mode of measuring ones efforts in the old world. When you needed a well to be dug up, you measure that work against certain amount of equivalent work. But in new media, the role of money is going to change and the work you do for somebody will not be exclusive for that person or instance. For instance, if you code a particularly interesting feature for a website, you just have to enable it across as many numbers of websites as possible. There is no much additional effort involved. But there is a return and the return is more like a favor to be drawn upon when required.

This implies that two kind of work will earn revenues in future, one is an original creative work of any kind and other is a regular operational work.

Most of the work that will get done driven sharing than anything. I needed one person to help me out and person helped me out in setting up a website, though no money exchanged hands I certainly owe him a favor and would love advertise for his company on my site. That’s the new economy here.

Most of the ‘work’ however will remain in the realm of payment mode even if we are in hyper cybernetic society. But as we move ahead into increased integration of our lives over new media, we will see collaboration from most unexpected quarters and amazingly the driver for the collaboration won’t be money.

The driver is likely to be a favor, credentials/ testimonial, a recommendations or networking etc, but as people link up - role money will be lot lesser in these scenarios.