Social Ch@nge

Congratulations. The staff meeting isn’t going badly so far. Everyone’s agreed that your web page has to be redone and your tech intern is bubbling with suggestions and terms you’ve (sort of) encountered before like ‘wiki-platforms’, ‘social networking’ and ‘web 2.0’. Just before you’re totally lost, the intern rolls their eyes and tries to bottom-line you with ‘Interactivity means that together, we’re all smarter.’ Your team looks dubious.

What that intern should be showing you instead is this brilliant clip explaining some of the basic concepts of ‘Web 2.0′, created by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of anthropology at Kansas U.

Linking us together is one thing. But problem solving? New ways of connecting? It’s hard to get a handle on the possibilities for social change here – and on the possibilities for getting the message out about your cause. For this reason, some are calling it Hippie 2.0, meaning that the connections opened up by social networking sites and 2.0 info-sharing has made it a lot easier for us to learn about global issues, and to get motivated to do something about them.

One rapidly-developing angle on this is gamer culture. Flash mobs pushed the possibilities for using modern technology like cell phones (and more recently Facebook) to get large groups of people together in one area to participate in a mass activity – here you can check out a recent evolution of this, the Freeze Mob. Most of these gatherings were silly – that was the point – but flash protests are becoming common as well.

One of the San Francisco flash mob organizers, Jane McGonigal, is also a programmer and game theorist. She was one of the people behind The Beast – a massive online immersive reality game that involved 1500 people working together to solve a mystery involving puzzles and clues left online, on their answering machines, on their fax machines and in public venues. What astonished the organizers was how ’smart’ the players were in a group – one group pooled their intelligence and resources to solve 3 months worth of near-impossible puzzles in one day.

This gave McGonigal an idea. World Without Oil was a 32 week socially conscious game that asked players to imagine what their lives would be like if the world hit oil crisis now. Players posted blog entries, sent in videos and emails and changed their status on social networking sites to reflect the changes they’d be making to their lives. At the end of 32 weeks, players had changed their real lives by adopting more environmental practices – and survived the oil crisis in the world of the game.

Interactivity on the web means that whether you’re playing a game or launching a protest, you’re pooling the resources of a lot of people to build something far bigger – and possibly smarter – than your staff meeting started with. If this seems a little too grassroots for your non-profit, consider this: your website helps give the population you serve a powerful online voice. How you choose to amplify that voice depends on you.