A tiny pendant to the previous post: One of the ways I try to maintain the very possibility of thinking of this blog in gift-economy terms is by avoiding all analytics. I don’t know how many people read this blog — I’d guess that regular readers are probably in the high two figures — ; I don’t know which posts get more attention and which get less. (Not posting to Twitter helps here also.) My ignorance protects me from playing to the crowd. Since I crave attention as much as the next guy, preserving my ignorance is an important discipline for me.
I also want to write at some point about how this blog can even potentially participate in the gift economy only because I do other things that participate in the market economy.