Socially Redeeming Web 2.0?
| Other articles on: | information technology • social change • Nonprofit Management |
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| Posted: | July 19, 2006 10:49 AM |
| Author: | Perla Ni |
I live in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley and in the middle of this so called “social web” revolution where the new deities are MySpace and YouTube.
These new social-networking technologies put the tools for sharing information and publishing in any one’s hands. And many nonprofits are taking advantage of similar new tools. Homelessnation, which has outreach teams in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto enables ordinary people to create videos of the stories of homeless people. GlobalVoices, co-founded by Ethan Zuckerman, aggregates the best reports from bloggers from around the world about serious issues in their home countries. (Even Mal Warwick, the guru on the oldest technologies in the world, direct mail, has started a podcast.)
Yet while there are many who take advantage of these technologies to further the important issues in society, these have yet to develop an audience to pose a serious challenge to the mass public who primarily still want to be amused and entertained. Just look at the astounding audience numbers for MySpace and YouTube. Not all the content being created and shared by the members of these two sites are mindless entertainment, but…well, judge for yourself. (To MySpace’s credit, earlier this month, they launched a contest for best video public-service announcements encouraging social activism.)
“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire, but it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends, ” said Edward R. Murrow of the television almost 50 years ago. And we face the same question now. What other sites are taking advantage of the social web’s capabilities to enable people to share/participate in on social issues? Please share them with us here. Let’s see if we can get more people - you, me and our friends and neighbors - to spend, say 30 minutes a week on the web learning and participating in important issues of the day.
Comment
As technology evolves rapidly, I think we will need to refine our terminology. When I first planned MentorNet (http://www.MentorNet.net), the E-Mentoring Network for Diversity in Engineering and Science, a nonprofit organization, in 1996, I’m not sure the term “social entrepreneur” had even been coined, let alone “social networking” (and of course, spam, viruses, and blogs were also unknown or in their infancy at the time). Over the years, following to some extent the evolution of Internet technologies applied for socially beneficial applications, I realize I am a “social entrepreneur” and that MentorNet represents a highly functional example of both a virtual community (that term, of course, dates back to 1971, but opportunities for such communities have expanded incredibly over the last decade due to the development of the web and associated technologies) and a “social networking” site. Yet, with a highly structured and purposeful networking system, MentorNet is quite different in a variety of ways from other from ventures like MySpace and YouTube, and as a nonprofit, MentorNet is different from commercial enterprises like LinkedIn, iVillage, and eHarmony… So let’s consider some terminology that might fall under the umbrella of a very broad term like “social networking”—what might be the different characteristics that we would want to catalog?
»» Posted by: Carol Muller` on August 3, 2006 12:21 PM