Ethically Challenged?

There's been a lot said in the past year about Slacktivism -- that portmanteau of the words "slacker" and "activism" that has become a derogatory term for click-and-give philanthropy. But now, a new MacArthur-funded study unveiled today at Mashable's Social Good Summit 2010 says many young people, when online, simply don't act very morally or ethically and need to be mentored by the social good community to play more generously (and civically) with others.

"While social media offer youth new powers, (young people) need to learn to use those powers more responsibly for good," Carrie James, the research director and principal investigator at Harvard University's Project Zero told summit-goers. "Right now, our findings show that youth tend to consider their own interests above all when they're online and ignore the reality that online, they are participants in large public communities. If youth are to leverage new media for civic participation, they will need to start seeing online life as consequential and meaningful -- and not simply as a joke, for fun or something that helps them pursue only their individual interests."

James shared these new findings from her team's current research:

* Young people tend not to think that they have a responsibility towards others when they are online. James said that one young woman she interviewed told the Project Zero team the following: "I do online what I want to do online. I don't really feel like its anybody's business to tell me what I should or shouldn't do. I don't really feel responsible to people online. I definitely feel like it's more for me and not for anyone else." James said she and her team found this attitude to be "a bit unsettling, at the very least."

* Young people don't care much about what impact their online choices have on others, including on the feelings of others and on social justice and fairness. "One of the most significant properties of new media is that they allow for interactions with groups of people beyond our known circles," James said. "I think the level of moral thinking among the youth we studied is not sufficient for participation in these new spaces. ... (Young people online) seem to ignore the reality that online, they are participants in larger communities."

* Ethical thinking is scarce among online youth. "There is very little capacity (on the part of the youth studied) to think in the abstract" about what their actions -- such as downloading music illegally, for example -- might have on others, such as the musicians who created the music or on the music business that is trying to sell it. "This is the rarest way of thinking that we found about online life in our study," James said. "It's a mindset devoid of ethical considerations."

* There is a prevailing view that online life is just for fun, and cannot be influenced. One young person told James: “Most of the time when people see something online, their main reaction is to laugh because most of the stuff on the Internet you have no sway over at all, so you just laugh and move on." James said this comment reflects two sentiments that her team found to be common among the young people they were studying. "One sentiment is that the Net is just for fun," James said, "and the other is that people feel they can't change things they find to be unsettling online." The irony? "Despite the great powers that social media give young people, these powers can often go unacknowledged."

* There is an absence of moral and ethical supports for online life. "While many youth can name an adult mentor or role model, James says, very few youth in the Project Zero study said there was an adult present in their online decision-making. Among older youth, aged 15-25, she said, adults were "virtually absent." In her study of Tweens, adults were more present but their conversations with Tweens tended to focus mostly on Internet safety rather than on online ethics and citizenship.

To be sure, the picture is not entirely bleak, James says. Groups like dosomething.org, InvisibleChildren.org the More Than Me Foundation "do a great job of involving youth in social good projects." But for the most part, James added, the nonprofit sector "represents an untapped opportunity to leverage social media for social good" among young people.

What do you think? Do nonprofits do enough to involve young people in social causes through the use of social media? Should they do more? How much differently might adults act online compared with the youth surveyed by James' team?

[For more on this subject, see "Slacktivism" and "After Slacktivism" in Cause Global from earlier this year.]

Here's the livestream video of James' speech, as delivered earlier today:

mashable on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illlustration by Doodlemachine for istock.com)

Location Awareness

There have been some new online drives to raise the visibility of homeless people in recent months. [See InvisiblePeople.tv, for starters, which attempts to de-stigmatize the homeless by posting short video interviews with them about their plight.]

But in Austin last week, a nonprofit/for-profit collaboration -- between a local nonprofit, a billboard company and an advertising agency -- raised that visibility to even greater heights, literally. The nonprofit Mobile Loaves and Fishes, the Reagan Outdoor Advertising company, and the T3 marketing agency created what they called the "I Am Here" campaign, a combination billboard/mobile texting project to get Danny Silver, a local homeless man and former steelworker, off the streets.

For three days last week, the billboard, located off I-35 in Austin, asked passing motorists to text money to MLF for Silver; Silver and his wife, Maggie, were hoisted 50 feet to the billboard's catwalk, where they camped out during the campaign. The billboard read, "I am Danny. I am homeless. I am here." By the end of the week, with support from Mobile Giving, motorists texted some $1,200 to MLF in $10 donations and MLF gave the Silvers a mobile home.

Here's a video about the Silvers that was created as part of the campaign:

What do you think? Is this a mobile form of panhandling, give-ploitation, or simply a sign (groan) of the times? [It worked.]

Let us hear from you.

[Photo courtesy MLF)

Twitter Snitches 2

And now, from the "double-edged-sword" school of social media comes a report that Twitter could become the latest terrorist tool for coordinating militant attacks. Check out this October 16 draft report by the Army's 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, posted on the Federation of the American Scientist's Web site. The report offers a number of scenarios and says that Twitter, when used with a cell phone camera/video capability, could help terrorists conduct ambushes or plot supply routes in difficult terrain. A Nokia 6210 Navigator, with its GPS utilities, is particularly analyzed. For more on the report, go to Noah Shachtman's Danger Room blog.

(Photo illustration by Dan Dycus for istock.com)

Mobile Volunteers

NYU new media professor and Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky likes to tell the story about a recent day when two of his friends were sitting with their four-year-old daughter, watching a DVD. "In the middle of the movie, apropos nothing," Shirky says, the girl jumps up off the couch and runs behind the screen. Her dad thought she was going to see if Dora (the explorer, from the kid’s cartoon show) was hiding there. But no, the girl was rooting around in the cables. "What are you doing?" her father asked. Sticking her head out from behind the screen, the girl says, “Looking for the mouse.”

For Shirky, it's a tale of the times. “Four-year-olds know a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken,” he says. “Four-year-olds know that media that is targeted at you—but that doesn’t include you—may not be worth sitting still for.”

No question: all social media innovators today are “looking for the mouse”—working to find new ways to let those who use, hear, read, and watch media to participate more fully. The most innovative enlist the use of mobile phones for a cause: the nonprofit National Democratic Institute uses text messaging to spot vote fraud in elections around the globe; Witness.org asks its supporters to photograph human rights abuses with their cellphones; the Zumbido project in Mexico created a mobile social network for people living with HIV/AIDS.

But nobody has cracked the challenge of "on demand" volunteering—until now. Social media entrepreneur and activist Ben Rigby, author of Mobilizing Generation 2.0, thinks he's "found the mouse" for it with Volunteer NOW, his on-the-spot, GPS-aided mobile application that directs people who suddenly find themselves with some free time on their hands to a list of short-term volunteering opportunities near to their present location—be it an airport, an office building, a local Starbucks, or a city park. Rigby's goal: to transform volunteering into an "impulse activity" that, for the cause-wired not otherwise looking to tune out or cat-nap, could be done on the fly. (Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non-English speaker. Or, text for the nearest beach or park clean-up drive and spend your lunch hour in the sun.)

"Projects like SETI@Home showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers' spare CPUs to crunch data," Rigby says. "(Volunteer NOW! ) explores the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human 'CPUs.' We believe it will reveal a massive, untapped capacity to do good."

Rigby is not the only social media innovator intrigued by the idea of spare-time, mobile volunteering. Leaders of Do Something, a New York-based nonprofit, started using mobile phones in March to recruit volunteers. The Beta version of its Do Something NOW! mobile program, funded in part by the Sprint Foundation, invites young people to sign up for volunteering through a form on its Web site; Do Something then sends them one or two text alerts each month with volunteer opportunities that fit their locations and preferences. So far, more than 1,000 people have signed up for the text alerts: Do Something hopes to have 10,000 signed up by year's end. Opt-out rates, says Chief Marketing Officer Aria Finger, are running less than 5%.

Look for more examples of mobile volunteering in the months ahead. Katrin Verclas, founder of MobileActive.org, will be showcasing some at her global summit on cause-mobile technology in Johannesburg, South Africa, October 13-15. Google's recent entry into the mobile phone market will add fuel to the mobile advocacy movement in coming months.

For more on how cellphones and other social media are dramatically changing society's notions of free time, check out the Blip.tv video of Clay Shirky's wildly popular talk at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this past spring. It's about 10 minutes long but well worth the cognitive surplus—Shirky's term for free time—that you carve out to watch it.

(Illustration by Richard Borge c/o theispot.com)