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1. Introduction
As any neologism, "crowdfunding" could be considered a faddish concept linked with temporary social trends (such as crowdsourcing or micro-funding in the sole area of financial practices) and contemporary economic contexts (financial crisis, credit crunch, etc.). Nevertheless, a historical view on alternative ways of raising funds shows this practice is far from being substantially new, the only novelty proceeding from technologies (i.e. Internet) and vocabulary (Castrataro, 2011). Thus, the term "crowdfunding" would be worth being examined, so as to determine if it only reflects a contemporary make up for old ideas, or, on the contrary, if it is meaningful of a deep change in social structures. But wherever the true meaning lies between these two extremes, the use of "crowd" as a "key actor" should be examined more thoroughly, as well as the process of funding, which covers different fields of practices. Indeed, considering society through the only scope of crowd may seem quite reductive, unless it proves some ideological usefulness.
The term crowdfunding is supposed to have been used for the first time in August 2006 by a US digital experimenter, Michael Sullivan, when launching his "fundavlog" project, an attempt of incubator for videoblog-related events (Maguire, 2013). A few months before in the same year (in June), the word crowdsourcing was coined by Howe (2006) in Wired (14.06). The trick consisted in replacing "out" with "crowd" in the term "outsourcing". Once again, crowd as a concept appears to be central to the development of Internet-based economic practices. So, far beyond the "bubble" it may depict, the term "crowdfunding" could be significant of a Zeitgeist (in the meaning of Schumpeter, 1954), as Howe himself seems to confirm it when asked to confirm paternity (in Biewald, 2009). If an additional proof of the preeminence of the reference to "crowd" was to be found, it could be done by a short analysis of how terminology around such concepts is consolidating presently. As far as English denominations are concerned over the past six years, crowdsourcing has been preferred to competing expressions such as participative funding, peer-funding, fan-funding and micro-funding. We may assume that this preference is not accidental, but that it is significant of a deeper social trend.
A Zeitgeist is defined by Schumpeter as...