I am the least likely defender of high-tech gizmos who ever walked. There's been a light bulb burned out in my bathroom for days because the ladder defeats me. Please don't start with the "how many feminists does it take to change a light bulb" jokes. We'll just get distracted, and I'm pretty sure I have a point here.
In spite of my basically Luddite nature, there are technological bits of wizardry that have changed my life. I've gone on and on about my iPod. We're thinking of ditching our land-line and going with cell phones for everyone. With the phones, there's not the utter delight that I have for the iPod. Yet, there's comfort in knowing, for example, that my children have access to help while they're out living their lives. Wireless internet access, nifty phones with full keyboards, social networking, podcasting... these are all great inventions. At least so far, for me.
The big question on my mind, though, is how better to use the tools that so delight me -or even the ones that don't- to change the world. I want to think about ways to eliminate barriers, to widen the conversation and the possibilities for action, so that we have more than a lot of very entertaining navel-gazing going on. The easier version of this question is how to use our nifty cyber-tools to enhance the delivery of social services. Is even this much possible in a time when, quite literally, most of the non-profit agencies I can think of have fairly useless (although sometimes expensive and flashy) websites? Even something as static as a website (which you have to wait for someone to visit) isn't being used as a way to disseminate information to all an agency's constituents. And typically, clients are the ones left out. Could we do better work with podcasts, blogs, RSS feeds, wikis.... and cooler stuff that I don't even know anything about? Emily has some stuff to say about this issue. Her post is fairly old by now, but it's still good.
I can think of some interesting examples for the smaller question, but my guess is that there are more creative ideas out there than these. There was a spontaneous (although badly organized) effort to locate missing people after Hurricane Katrina. Volunteers with computers were doing data entry to websites, with the names and locations of "found" people. It didn't work very well, as it happens, but with energy, coordination, and forethought, I don't see why it couldn't next time. Radio personalities and bloggers (frequently from minority populations, by the way) are largely responsible for the encouraging turnouts at the immigration rallies in Los Angeles. The pro-choice movement has some interesting on-line activity happening as a result of the South Dakota ban.
Extending the question to more global social change makes answering it more difficult, of course. The internet is good at widening the conversation, allowing people who would otherwise never have met to interact. Blogs and podcasts aren't a great tool for that; check out this link for an interesting post re: blogs and conversation: Amy Gahrain. Wikis might be a better choice, though. Nonetheless, I'm hoping for more still. What blogs have done is popularize the dissemination of the news. Somehow I want the internet and all my cyber-toys to change the way we think about information and access to it. To whom does information belong? Is it meant to be free, as my friend Lianne says? How do we not just get it to the people who are historically separate from it, but help them to create it too? This site is really just beginning, but it could be on the right track: Progressive Focus.
If someone like me now can't leave the house without grabbing a Blackberry, an iPod, a laptop, and heaven only knows what else.... then surely converting other people will be a comparatively simple task. Help me figure this out, you guys. These guys have taken a stab at it, but I think we can expand on their thoughts: Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.
No comments:
Post a Comment