Struggling with Gift-Giving Obligations: When Mobile Messages are too Laborious to Reciprocate

Messaging with new media should be fun, but sometimes participating in conversations can become a burden for users due to the effort required. In this paper, examples of such situations are presented from a study on a multimedia program for mobile phones that can be used to create MMS-based comic strips. The examples show how the social system of gift-giving obligations, originally presented by anthropologist Marcel Mauss, still has a role in everyday social interaction of today. The identified problems give rise to a number of design implications to alleviate problems in gift-giving.