Understanding of the Concept of Digital Altruism and What Defines Altruistic Behavior on the Internet

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As has been mentioned above research on the altruism online or ‘digital altruism’ has been rather scarce, and the term itself was coined in 2011 by Dana Klisanin. Digital altruism was defined as “altruism mediated by digital technology”, while 'digital altruists' are individuals that engage in occasional acts of 'digital altruism'. More specifically, 'digital altruists' are individuals that are occasionally motivated to act on behalf of other people, animals, the environment, higher causes, through the medium of digital technologies. By mashing moral concern with digital technologies, humanity has given birth to a new form of altruism: digital altruism, which is potentially a new turn in 'world-consciousness' (Gruber’s 1997) on the path to solving global problems of humanity.

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Altruistic behavior on the net can be found in private email lists, private social networks, and corporate intranets (e.g., Bock, Zmud, Kim, & Lee, 2005; Constant, Sproull, & Kiesler, 1996; Johnson, Haigh, Becker, Craig, & Wigley, 2008; Kankanhalli, Tan, & Wei, 2005; Olivera, Goodman, & Tan, 2008; Wasko & Faraj, 2005; Wellman & Gulia, 1999). Hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily help strangers in many ways on the net.

These include donating funds to worthy causes through online charitable organizations, donating idle computing power from their personal computers (PCs) to help scientists analyze large data files, working on projects that create freely-available information products like open source software and encyclopedia articles, working on projects organized for socially-worthwhile causes, such as electronically mentoring disadvantaged students or making public domain literature freely available on the web, offering support to one another in discussion forums. (Amichai-Hamburger, 2013)

Technical and social components interact to form the context that supports altruistic behavior on the net. Technical components include hardware, software, data and file structures, and communications systems; social components include goals, roles, rules, and norms. One such social element is that in the offline world, one of the impediments to asking for help is the perceived threat to one’s public self-image (Karabenick & Knapp, 1988). Physical invisibility may reduce that perceived threat in the online world; so, too, may the use of pseudonyms, screen names, or anonymous postings. On the other hand, transaction costs are substantially lower than they would be in an offline context.

People can participate at any hour of the day or night from any place with technology and net access. They can fit their contributions into their own schedule. The basic unit of participation is often quite small—a message, an edit, a label, an upload, a “share-with-your-network” click, a monetary pledge. It consumes a small unit of time and attention and represents a voluntary micro-contribution to the community (Sproull & Arriaga, 2007). Some people may devote many hours a week to online prosocial activity, but they can do so in small units of time at their convenience. Volunteers note that (p.147) convenience and schedule flexibility are two common reasons for choosing to volunteer online (Mukherjee, 2010). In this case, low transaction cost is an attribute of the electronic context that makes it relatively easy to be helpful, but convenience is not the only determinant of altruism. Personal variables and interaction processes are also relevant.

Although no two contexts are exactly the same, many of them can be categorized broadly in terms of a dominant software application and the degree to which help is delivered via a direct connection to an identified person. (Amichai-Hamburger, 2008). And while public helping is salutary, this paper will be focusing on private helping, for two reasons. Firstly, private context research has been underinvestigated as opposed to public online donations. Secondly, private contexts offer an opportunity to understand behavior about which the offline world provides few opportunities for study, namely, social norms within friends online that cause them to help with no expectation of direct reciprocity or reward voluntarily. It is also important to distinguish that this paper will not be focusing on any side of the financial altruism.