Not Another Ad Network!
I believe that we need to figure out a way to unlock the true potential of the web wrt causes for social change and benefit, especially to impact those in third world countries (if such potential even exists, and I believe it does).
The web is extremely powerful for being able to connect up millions of people with similar thoughts, ideas, or intentions, and to facilitate interactions between these people. The ease of finding information and engendering interactions has partially resulted in what we call the attention economy, which treats human attention as a scarce commodity. It stands to reason that this attention therefore has implicit value (does attention actually have implicit value if it is not acted upon?), and I hope we can find a way to capitalize on it to allow people to effortlessly contribute to social good.
Getting people to help the needy is, as I see it, a 2 part problem, consisting of:
1) generating lasting awareness (not the 10 seconds of empathy you feel upon watching the news on CNN), and creating a genuine desire within individuals to want to contribute to the goal of eradicating the ill/problem at hand, and
2) empowering these people with the tools to make changes for the better.
The second part, while appearing innocuous enough, is actually far more nuanced than the first, and is the real problem that we need to solve. How many of us feel terrible about extreme poverty, about preventable disease in third-world countries, about the lack of access to basic human needs for a large portion of our global population? Yet, how many of us actually contribute something to the larger cause on a daily basis? While this is cynical, I believe that the tools we give to people contribute to change simply cannot require them to inconvenience their lifestyle. Typical solutions, to bring about real change, require people to donate substantial amounts of either:
Money— this is obviously difficult in tough economic times (but do the poor no longer feel hunger when the Dow falls 500 points?),
-or-
Time— people will give up only so much of their time (this varies from person to person, depending on their desire to elicit change— some will join the Peace Corps, others will volunteer at the soup kitchen), and most of the time will continue to do so only if they can see visible evidence of their impact (after all, who wants to contribute their precious time to a losing cause? Again, this “evidence threshold” varies from person to person).
What we really need is to tap into the power of the attention economy and the ability of the internet to connect people with common goals, and create a system whereby we can easily contribute to positive change in the world. What we need is a common platform to educate people about desperate problems that need their attention, and provide them with simple, easy-to-implement ways to bring about the solution.
Web 2.0 generates a lot of buzz for its ability to easily connect people & allow them to create & share their own content, and for overall generating whole systems that are greater than the sum of their parts. It’s time to take that ideal and apply it to things that really need our attention.
[UPDATE: Today also happens to be Blog Action Day, where at least 9,000 bloggers are writing about poverty]
