Reboot asks: from social media to social good?

In 1997 Charles Handy wrote a book called the Hungry Spirit, in it he asked

Can Capitalism be made more decent and its instrument business work more obviously for the good of all, everywhere?

Handy to my mind sits alongside Ivan Illich as one this country’s great unsung heroes. As his thinking, a decade later has taken center stage and Andy Hobsbawm takes Handy’s theme forward in an article for the Independent that forms a series of leading articles and thought pieces that shape the thinking around the Reboot Britain participatory conference [6th July @ the Savoy Place] He points out that cooperation, represents the dawn of; civilisation, and of community based groups, who understand that cooperation provides the very best form of survival – for all.

Andy’s insight is…

communal impulses are older than our civilisations and an in-built part of how humans behave in groups. Digital tools and network technology hasn’t changed this, but it has made new kinds of collective interaction possible, given us many new channels of social and philanthropic expression, and made it much more potent and visible as an information-based economic activity.

The internet has the ethos of cooperation written into its very DNA – we have taken the code of human beings and written it in digital form. Andy lists 6 examples of technologies of cooperation – working towards the social good. [you ccan read more about them in the Independent article]

1. Mass collaboration

2. Mutual aid networks

3. Micro-donations

4. Micro-lending

5. Public innovation challenges

6. Social business resources

I believe that the crisis of our post modern society is a crisis of meaning, as does Andy, and he quotes Nobel Laureate economist Robert Fogel, ‘people’, says Fogel ‘have enough to live, but nothing to live for; they have the means, but no meaning’. This crisis is not to be understated – from it stems an extraordinary array of complex social problems that the state struggles to manage and find credible solutions to. Charles Handy writes

In Africa, they say there are two hungers, the lesser hunger and the greater hunger. The lesser hunger is for the things that sustain life, the goods and the services, and the money to pay for them, which we all need, The greater hunger is for an answer to the question “why?”, for some some understanding of what that life is for… to think that better bread, and a bit of cake to go with it, would make us all content, because governments and business together might be able to deliver on that contract. The consequence of that thinking is that money ultimately becomes the measure of all things. We can measure our lives in pound notes, deutschmarks or dollar bills and then compare our scores. we have all become Hungry Spirits.

And this statistic, I find extraordinary, volunteering in Britain nearly doubled between 1994 and 2004.The quest for identity, meaning and belonging in this world has inspired, organised and driven the creation, installation and deployment of Technologies of Cooperation.

Now we have a vastly expanded range of ways to make these meaningful contributions online. And not only are there many new, global channels to find meaning by giving or sharing, but people can see the cumulative effects of their participation as it happens. This is an entirely new and extremely powerful combination: the collective power of connected individuals; ‘network effects’ making the whole ever greater than the sum of the individual contributions; and people perceiving the growing force of their individual contributions massed together, which stimulates more of the same behaviour.

Anyone that pooh poohs this as liberal bullshit had better thank again. Jamais Cascio, argues that technology can be weilded as agaents of social and political change. I will leave that though hanging….

Jeffrey Sachs in Commonwealth wrote that…

the defining challenge of the twenty-first century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet. That common fate will require new forms of global cooperation, a fundamental point of blinding simplicity that many world leaders have yet to understand or embrace… In the twenty-first century our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the  practical means to achieve them.

Andy recognises the same challenges through his own lens,

There’s no doubt that the internet symbolises a potential global connectedness the like of which we’ve never seen. And this comes at a time when a challenge like climate change represents a global crisis the like of which we’ve never faced. The only way to tackle something that affects all of us is together, so some level of global consciousness is going to need to take place if mankind can defeat a problem of this scale.

Reboot is a event happening next Monday [6th July @ the Savoy Place] exploring what and how Britain in the networked society could be and should be like. You should come along

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