How Can Social Technology Create Change?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 12th, 2008 9:00 AMYesterday I got sucked into the site Ted.com which is not hard to do. While watching an inspiring video I began to wonder about the impact of social technology. I spend so much time thinking about news pertaining to social networks and social media or about how it improves advertising or about a number of issues pertaining to it. Not yet have I considered specifically how social technology can be used to positively effect peoples’ lives. I don’t mean to get sappy but it is something to consider.
I see social networks such as Razoo.com, a D.C. based social network for change, in addition to sites such as Change.org, Zaadz.com, Gaia.com and a number of others. While I think that the technology is transforming our lives I think it becomes very easy to become overly dependent on social technology to solve many of our problems or quickly generate weak-ties to others. While we can become overly dependent, social technology must be capable of generating inspiring stories from people that have connected thanks to these new services.
I know that thanks to social media I now have hundreds if not thousands more contacts and I have now been able to expand my personal brand. While not a particularly inspiring story necessarily, it has been life-changing. As such there must be other stories by people where thanks to social technology their lives have been changed for the better. Has your life been positively changed thanks to social technology? What stories have you heard of others? How can we use social technology be used to drive change?
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For example, with the Facebook app Causes, you add a badge to your profile that says look how cool I am because I associate myself with these causes.
For a while it was the thing to support the Creative Commons cause so everyone did it.
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