There are still quite a few people who have an outdated view of how the Internet is impacting society. It just isn’t as black and white as some suggest. While some studies are indicating that Internet use is deteriorating family time and other face-to-face social interactions, that isn’t the full story. The other side of that story is that people are using mobile technologies to be more active in trying effect positive change in the physical world, in connecting with others in meaningful ways. Toward that end, Linton Weeks wrote an excellent article at npr.org on The Extraordinaries: Will Microvolunteering Work? Weeks writes, “Shazzam! Charity meets brevity. Crowdsourcing for the common good. Turning ADD into AID.”
This article highlights the side of mobile technologies and the digital culture that is actually grounding us even more in the physical world around us, not to mention the physical world half a planet away. The fact is that many of us have, in the words of John Muir (although I’m admittedly re-purposing the quote) lived “on the world but not in the world” for quite some time. The full quote is, ““Most people are on the world, not in it – having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them – undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate”” Even when we are AWK, wandering the physical sidewalks, we often walk right past the hurting and the problems all around us. While I’m the last person to propose that mobile technologies or any other invention will improve what I consider to be a fundamentally flawed human nature, it is fascinating to see how some are making use of these mobile devices to get back into the world, reach out, help out, speak up, get up, chip in, and live in their local communities…even if it is just via a text message or a quick cell phone photo sent to public works in order to fix a pothole. Or, thanks to services like kiva.org, donorschoose, and globalgiving; we get a very different picture of what is taking place when we see that person sitting on the subway typing on a two inch keypad, seemingly oblivious to the people around. Who knows, that person might be the in the middle of giving a no interest loan to a needy and aspiring low income entrepreneur on the other side of the world.
Thanks to Linton Weeks for reporting on a wonderful and fascinating side to this new digital world.
