The Internet and Social Change

Definitely watch Clay Shirky's TED talk about his must-read book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. He covers crisis mapping, which is an incredible new tool for democracy, which was started in 2007 to document human rights violations in Kenya through crowd sourcing, more here. Sounds like something Syria, Egypt, Libya, and really any country could use. 


I was also taken by Shirky's mention of lolcats. He contextualizes lolcats by reminding us that there were pornographic novels printed before academic peer-reviewed journals. We are just scratching the surface of the internet's potential, it makes sense that we see a rise in a lowest common denominator, like porn or lolcats. 


What Shirky delves into further in Cognitive Surplus is the drastic difference between passive and interactive media. Lolcats are a step above Jersey Shore because at least the viewer made something instead of passively consuming, we are now all producers of culture. He claims that the amount of time spent creating wikipedia is smaller than the amount of time American's spend watching tv every weekend. That alone is a chilling realization that the internet is truly an untapped resource.


(more books you should read if you are interested in the future of technology here)

"WITNESS uses video to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. WITNESS empowers people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change." more

Although maybe not as adaptive and generative as Crisis Mapping, Witness seems to be a very legitimate global effort to arm citizens with the tools to have a voice. This trope has gained currency, now that you can upload a video of police brutality, like this one from #OccupyWallStreet, and it can easily get over 500,000 views in a couple of days. The saying "The whole world is watching", seems more true than ever before and organizations like Witness are helping.

Architecture for Humanity utilizes the ability of architects to solve real problems. By spreading architectural designs all over the globe through their Open Architecture Network, an open-source community of architects and designers are working to confront the problems that architecture can solve, for people who couldn't afford it before.

This program is freeing up information that highly educated and skilled designers and architects know and usually charge for. This spreading of architectural solutions to various geographical and political problems is fantastic.

At first I was worried by the notion of a firm in Europe 'solving' a problem for a community in rural Africa. Sound familiar World Bank and IMF? Architecture for Humanity couples the designers with the men and women on the ground, creating a collaboration of information running in both directions to help make the best plans possible.