Are We Still Here?

Last week in Maine, at PopTech's annual thinkfest, America Reimagined, writer Anthony Doerr read aloud an essay he wrote for the January/February 2009 issue of Orion Magazine called Am I Still Here?—about our always-on, Web-centric world. Neither too sentimental nor apocalyptic, it's a pitch-perfect reflection of this moment in our culture; Doerr got a standing ovation.

[Go ahead. Take the five minutes away from your BlackBerry to read it. Guaranteed it will free up some time for you later.] Here's the text of it, from his reading:

I HARBOR A DARK TWIN INSIDE. He’s a sun-starved, ropy bastard and he lives somewhere north of my heart. Every day he gets a little stronger. He’s a weed, he’s a creeper; he’s a series of thickening wires inside my skull.

Call him Z. I like weather; Z survives in spite of it. I like skiing; Z likes surfing the web. I like looking at trees; Z likes reading news feeds. I pull weeds in the garden; Z whispers in my ear about climate change, nuclear proliferation, ballooning health-insurance premiums.

Last week I flew into central Idaho on a ten-seat Britten-Norman Islander to spend five days in the wilderness. The plane’s engines throbbed exactly like a heartbeat. The sky was a depthless blue. Little white clouds were reefed on the horizon. Slowly, steadily, the airplane pulled us farther and farther from the gravel airstrip where we started, over the Tangled Mountains and the Tangled Lakes, big aquamarine lozenges gleaming in basins, flanked by huge, shattered faces of granite, a hundred miles from anything, and the ridgelines scrolling beneath my window were steadily lulling me into an intoxication, a daze—the splendor of all this!—and then Z tapped me (metaphorically) on the (metaphorical) shoulder.

Hey, he said. You haven’t checked your e-mail today.

“I THINK,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Walking,” “that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

Ha! Four hours! Clearly Thoreau did not own a BlackBerry.

Yesterday—and this is embarrassing—I checked my e-mail before leaving for work and after I got to work, and I checked it every now and then during the day at work, and, after bicycling home from work, a total distance of two miles, I checked my e-mail again. Just in case a few e-mails flew over my head through the rain while I pedaled home.

It’s disconcerting, it’s shameful. I tell myself: e-mail is work-related. E-mail is work-related and anything work-related is family-related, right? Because work makes money and money feeds the family. Money justifies all. Doesn’t it?

What my evil twin Z knows, and what I am loath to articulate, to even contemplate, is that checking e-mail or tinkering around on Facebook or reading snippets about Politician A on Blog B is not about making money at all but about asking the world a very urgent question.

That question is this: Am I still here?

Each time Z makes me guide the little mouse cursor to the Send & Receive button, he’s hollering into the impossibly complex snarl of underground and aboveground fiber linking every computer to every other: Am I part of this? Am I still here?

Yes, you’re here, Z, says Eddie Sloan re: Enlarge Your Penis 3+ Inches (100% GUARANTEED). You’re a part of it.

Yes, you’re here, Z, says Mark J. Silverman from legal, you’re here. Now forward me that memo.

Yes, you’re here, Z, says Matt Torrington from requisitions. You’re here all right, right here in last place in our football pool.

Since purchasing a little glassy machine called an iPhone, I’ve started checking e-mail in classrooms and in coffee shops. I’ve read news articles at stoplights, at my sons’ swimming lessons, at restaurants, and yes, once or twice in the bathroom while I peed.

Tap, tap, tap. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Paul Krugman, baseball scores, tide tables, http://www.edge.org, Immanuel Kant, blender-eats-camcorder, the tour schedule has changed, click here to watch a venomous snail paralyze a goldfish. Information, information, information—it’s all sustenance for that rawboned, insatiable, up-to-the-second twin of mine. I can stand in a river with my little sons beside me pitching pebbles into a deep, brilliant green pool with a flight of geese flapping along overhead and the autumn sun transforming the cottonwoods into an absolute frenzy of color—each leaf a shining, blessed fountain of light—and Z will start whispering in my ear about oil prices, presidential politics, the NFL.

What, Z wants to know, are we missing right now?

Addiction, neurologists say, changes the physical shape of our brains. Each time old Z finds another text message, another headline, another update, my brain injects a little dopamine into a reward pathway.

“You’ve got mail!” squeals the computer and—whoosh!—here comes a shot of dopamine.

I feel stronger, says Z.

Five minutes pass, the dopamine fades.

I’m weak, hisses Z. I’m hungry. I need to see a picture of Joe Biden.

WHAT IF, while you read the last few paragraphs, something in the world has changed? What if, during the past five minutes, someone, somewhere, sent you a text? Shouldn’t you go and check?

Being addicted to the wired universe might be perfectly healthy, of course, and it’s certainly defensible beneath the triumvirate of technology, curiosity, and progress. I’m the first to admit that there’s something enchanting and invigorating about my computer. There’s magic in reading a note from a friend in Rome and clicking through Halloween pictures from New Jersey and verifying John Steinbeck’s birth date in two clicks. The Internet is indeed its own strange, blessed fountain of light.

But sometimes I think Z’s demand to feel connected is tilting us both toward derangement, especially when we rise together at three a.m. and stare for a half hour into the black vacuum of the backyard and drink a glass of milk in the doorway of the kitchen before walking over to the computer and waking it up and finding out that while we sweated and twisted in the bedsheets, BeachReady Body had been preparing a totally unique and groundbreaking Body Transformation Formula for us, as well as for Leslie in New Mexico and Ben in Des Moines.

“We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.”
Do we like sitting by the fire?

We do.

Does it make us happy to think? It does. For a while. But pretty soon don’t we start worrying, now that we’ve stepped away from the world, that the world is slipping past without us? Don’t we wonder, when we come back, Am I still here?

Oh, the strange mix of revulsion and pleasure Z and I felt when we returned from five days under the sky in the middle of Idaho and watched the e-mail counter piling up: 21, 32, 58, 74 e-mails! Z has 74 e-mails! Z is indeed part of it all! Z was missed! Z exists!

We’re not the first to wonder about all this, Z and I, not the first to sense that maybe our shared life is rushing by too quickly, too feverishly. We’re not the first to feel as if we are scrambling to make our voices heard against an infinite and obliterating silence.

During the five days Z and I spent in the mountains, we saw lots of Shoshone pictographs, paintings made in caves mostly, and under overhangs: finger-painted elk and owls and dogs and triangle-bodied hunters with bows. Many of the pictographs in that area include hash marks, like rows of fence posts scratched downhill, but it’s anyone’s guess as to what these marks originally meant. Maybe they were offerings to the spirit world, or tallies of successful hunts, or records of vision quests. Maybe they were the consequence of someone sitting beside a fire and thinking happily away.

Whatever they once meant, they mean something else now. They mean memories are fragile, beliefs are tenuous, contexts are temporary. They mean nothing is stable—not mountains, not species, not cultures, not e-mail. The only quantities that ultimately persist are gravity and mystery. Uproar, as Keats said, is our only music.

What did I do today that will still retain its original meaning two hundred years from now? Might it be better, and more lasting, merely to walk home right now, and open the backyard gate, and lie down in the grass?

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME you were dazzled? When was the last time you lay down on a block of granite and fell asleep beneath the sky? Our few remaining pockets of unconnected, unwired time—walks, airplane trips, camp-outs, reading a novel on a beach—are dwindling fast. And yet: The Earth is 4.5 billion years old! There are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy! What could be wrong with shutting down the computer some afternoon and sauntering for four hours through the woods and over the hills and fields?
“Dad!” calls my four-year-old son, Owen. He runs inside; his hands are cupped; his eyes are wide open.

“I found a grasshopper leg!” He flexes it back and forth; he wants to know if he can keep it.

I throw my phone onto the couch. I lift my son into my lap.

“When I am in the country,” wrote the old English critic William Hazlitt, “I wish to vegetate like the country.”

Z hates vegetating. Z wants LinkedIn, Twitter, Google. Z wants me to pick up my phone and finish reading my e-mail. Instead I take my sons on a walk. Clouds are blowing into the valley, big and dark and full of shoulders, and the light is low and golden. The sage, blooming in the gulch beneath our house, billows and shines.

We try to be quiet; we try to be diligent; we try to breathe.

Am I still here?

All I have to do is look into the eyes of my children, walking beside me through the evening.

Yes, Daddy, their eyes say.

Of course you’re here, Daddy. You’re right here.

***

(Anthony Doerr's essay appears here with permission)
(Photo of Dorset countryside, top, by Black Beck Photographic)

When 7 Eats 9

The quote on UCLA statistician Nathan Yau's blog, flowingdata.com, is from a 1977 book by American statistician John W. Tukey, and reads: The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

Yau should know. His Web-powered data visualizations make dry-as-dirt statistics spring to life with new meaning. Yau's purpose is radical: to give today's policymakers [and you and me] a new, big dose of reality about the world. From global poverty rates to the time we waste in our daily lives, Yau is fascinated by it all.

"Data are much more than a bucket of numbers," says Yau, whose credits include a stint in the information graphics department of The New York Times. "There are stories in that bucket."

Yau's best-known data visualization so far shows the "viral" growth of Walmart across America. Another of his visualizations tracked the Twitter activity as Barack Obama became the 44th President, and Yau also has been working to make sense of the United Nations' 66 million records with his UNdata project, a series of graphical displays of global economic statistics. For the UN, Yau helped to create Progress: A Graphical Report on the State of the World.]

But now Yau is getting personal. This week, he released his latest project, your.flowingdata—a way for people to track their own data and interact with it. Is there a series of events that make you happy or sad? Yau wants to help you identify what those are, track them, and—ultimately—replicate or avoid them. "There are complex relationships going on between our everyday behaviors," Yau says. "I want YFD to help people gain a better understanding of those relationships so as to improve their quality of life."

How does it work? For now, Yau has built a Twitter interface. You login your data—like what you ate, how long you slept last night, how much you weighed this morning—and send it to @yfd in direct messages via Twitter, using specified keywords: tweet "gnite" when you go to sleep, for example, and "gmorning" when you awake, and keep track of your food intake with "ate chicken" or "drank beer." To find patterns in your behavior over time, login to YFD with your Twitter user name and Yau will plot it all in an easy-to-read personal statistics reader.

Yau is the first to acknowledge that personal data-tracking is, at least for now, still a bit "geeky." But as science and design continue to morph, he predicts, Web-powered self-monitoring will go mainstream.

YFD stems from Yau's current gig as a statistician for the urban sensing group at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA, a group of brainiacs developing PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report. Yau describes PEIR as "an online tool that allows you to use your mobile phone to explore and share how you impact the environment and how the environment impacts you." PEIR is all part of the new movement in location-based intelligence-gathering called participatory sensing. Check out this video on how PEIR works:



For an interview with Yau on his work, click on this recent piece that appeared in Fnewsmagazine.

Yau, of course, is not the first Web visualization whiz: Like Jonathan Harris before him, Yau was inspired by Hans Rosling, the 60-year-old grandfather of the dynamic data movement, whose dramatic visualizations at the 2006 TED festival clearly illustrate how Web 2.0 technologies can help us to "see" in numbers radical new "facts" about the world—in an effort to improve it and help solve social problems.

For other visualization data, check out this recent post by Yau, 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe. Also check out this one, from Wallstats.com, about the financial crisis. Here's yet another, about the flow of immigration into the United States:


Immigration to the US, 1820-2007 v2 from Ian Stevenson on Vimeo.

(Illustration, Number Head, by Miroslaw Pieprzyk)

Party's Over

The air in Davos this past week was so thick with gloom over the convulsing economy and Wall Street greed [$20 billion in bonuses paid out despite hefty bank bailouts and historic layoffs], that many CEOs leaving the World Economic Forum for home today "bore the harrowed looks of survivors of the Donner Party," according to Newsweek columnist Daniel Gross.

Quick, boys. It's time to dust off those old corporate social responsibility [CSR] initiatives and retool them into Web-driven programs that deliver—or your company may find its precious brands, recruitment efforts, and corporate culture worth zilch to Generation G (for Good). That's the name trendwatching.com gives—in a just-released report—to a growing segment of cause-wired, global consumers aged 40 or younger who consider "generosity" an important social and business mindset. "As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy...has there ever been more urgency for corporations to ditch the greed and embrace generosity?" the February 2009 report asks in its introduction. "...Sharing is the new giving...In this business climate, can you really afford not to spend some time figuring out how to get a little closer to your customers?"

Compiled for business leaders in more than 120 countries from a global network of 8,000 trendspotters, the report lists various ways firms might use social media and other initiatives to create social responsibility programs that matter:

*Co-donate. Collaborate with customers about how often to donate—and to which causes. Use online and mobile technologies "to make the most of impulse-driven and networked fundraising."
*Be eco-generous. Don't just offset your company's impact on the environment; find ways to improve it .
*Engage in "free love"—in this case, give away some goods, like free coffees or free travel guides to consumers.
*Use brand butlers to help customers make the most of the company's products. IKEA, for example, loans out branded bikes with trailers to its customers in Denmark to help them transport their purchases home.
*Engage in "perkonomics." Offer perks like reserved parking to, say, owners of a specific automotive brand, or let preferred customers jump queues at busy events.
*Offer "tryvertising." Let customers try products before they purchase them to make their purchasing decisions based on their product experiences rather than corporate brand messages.

There's no question: with public trust in CEOs and corporations at rock-bottom and the change mantra out of Washington [and Davos] still freshly potent, cause-wired social entrepreneurs have never had a better opportunity to boost traction for their Web-powered ideas as they head into the start of their own summit season—first at the vaunted TED2009 conference in Long Beach on Wednesday and then at the Skoll Foundation's World Forum in Oxford in March.

In the months ahead, expect aggressive efforts by leaders of the social enterprise movement to track and compile the ROI of social media in for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. Says new media expert Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations: "Design an environment where people can feel good at what they're doing...and they'll flock to your venture."

For more on designing initiatives for generosity that also work for the bottom line, see Shirky's talk at the recent Pop!Tech conference in Maine, below:

(Illustration by Miroslaw Pieprzyk)

Vote Watch

Social media as tools for election-monitoring are being put to their first U.S. presidential election test. Vote Report (which I wrote about here two weeks ago, when it launched) is a nationwide project that is asking anyone with a cellphone, personal digital assistant, iPhone, or computer and a Twitter account to immediately share any first-hand knowledge of voting irregularities via instant-messaging. You, too, can participate. For more information, check out project partner National Public Radio's recent podcast about the initiative here. (Also worth checking out is Twitter's general election 2008 page, the fast-running Twitter stream of commentary by voters heading into the final hours of this historic election cycle. Much of the chatter this morning alludes to voting delays and massive turnout that could slow final tallies.)

YouTube, meanwhile, has been working with PBS to organize its Video the Vote project, a national project that asks voters to shoot short videos with their cellphones or digital video cameras to document any examples of vote suppression or other problems—and then post them to the site. "This is a way to spotlight voter experience...and get people to show and share experiences where there have been exceedingly long lines, voter intimidation, or broken machines," says Steve Grove, head of news and politics for YouTube. "We want people to use YouTube to get those messages out to the world." Want to participate? Click here for a blip.tv video about how.

Other non-partisan election-monitoring and voter-information sites worth checking out include:

* iDashboards: a running string of results from the election that allows you to roll your mouse over states to see up-to-the-hour voting results so far.
* Social Median: a news aggregator with an election page that includes blogs and Twitter posts, along with an array of videos that can be filtered easily
* Topix election site: a national, digital debate by topic.
* FiveThirtyEight.com: a site that shows up-to-the-minute projections of who's winning, for political junkies who want to track the last-minute whims of the undecideds, all the way up to the concession speeches.
* TechPresident.com: a daily digest of Web content that tracks the election.

And here's one of my favorites, Shifting the Debate, which measures the movement of ideas through social networks, chiefly tracking which YouTube videos bloggers are linking to on both sides of the political spectrum. It is creating an ongoing portrait of video political commentary, with the site's Video Barometer displaying who's watching which videos, and which are most popular at any given time. Fascinating.

Go ahead, share your favorite electon sites and give us a head's up about your favorite election videos. And don't forget to vote.

(Illustration, Angry Elephant, by Diane Labombarbe for istock.com)

Cause-wired

In his 2002 book, Smart Mobs, futurist Howard Rheingold predicted the next social revolution would be triggered by the ubiquity of mobile phones. Their ability to send text messages, photographs, videos, and other instant data directly to a computer, he predicted, would give people a powerful new way to organize themselves to fight poverty and other social ills on the fly—ultimately reshaping cultures and transforming communities, for better or worse.

Rheingold's glimpse of the future is now—and is being promoted by a rising new crop of mobile activists like Katrin Verclas, cofounder of MobileActive.org, a Web site and community of about 8,000 people and NGOs from around the world. The group is meeting in Johannesburg this week to promote the use of cellphones for social change. About 80 percent of the world has cellphone coverage, Verclas says, and more than half of the global population has a cellphone—or access to one. "We're at a tipping point," Verclas told Cause Global.

Here are some of the mobile-for-good projects being highlighted at the MobileActive08 conference this week in South Africa:

Avaaz.org, the 10-month-old, Web-based, agit-pop protest movement (its name means "noise" or "voice" in Urdu, Hindi, Dari, Persian, and other languages) is kicking off a series of SMS (short message service) campaigns to get rapid signatures on petitions to fight climate change and the war in Iraq. Cofounded in January by MoveOn.org, Res Publica, and GetUp.org.au, Avaaz already has more than 3 million members around the world, and offices in Rio de Janeiro, Geneva, London, and Washington, D.C. Says Graziela Tanaka, an Avaaz coordinator in Sao Paolo, Brazil: “Cellphone videos and instant messaging has the affect of decentralizing old-media control over information. We think SMS and cellphone videos are the new way to mobilize people around the world. The Internet is still restricted in some countries. SMS is not. Everyone, or nearly everyone, has a cellphone.”

The Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) is using a "bulk SMS" service out of Cape Town to organize demonstrations against sexual violence, chiefly against girls 15 years and younger, and to share health information. The nonprofit sends out thousands of instant messages to a targeted list of members, simultaneously, to mobilize support for its various campaigns, without fear of interference by local governmental authorities or family members. According to WOUGNET's Nora Naiboka Odoi, cellphone use in many African countries is still largely controlled by the men in the family. SMS, she says, makes it easier for word about demonstrations to get out virally and bypass these constraints. Adds MobileActive.org's Verclas: “The cellphone in these communities is an empowerment tool, a way for women to reach out to each other as well as to get help in a violent situation."

Alo Cidadao! (Hello Citizens!) is a year-old text-messaging community news service that connects some 450 residents of the low-income section of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, with information about jobs, cultural events, classes, and health vaccinations. "People in this neighborhood are afraid to leave their homes," says coordinator Daniel de Araujo. "We are trying to help them feel less cut off and are encouraging them to re-join the mainstream by giving them knowledge about what's going on outside their doors." Each person who signed up for the service gets about 40 messages per month, Araujo says, and most forward these messages on to friends and family members.

The International Youth Foundation's BridgeIT project is using cellphones to boost the quality of education for 5th- and 6th-graders in the Philippines and Tanzania. Science and math teachers there can use their cellphones to download science videos and other content-rich material via satellite to a digital video recorder connected to a television set in the classroom. Videos focus on subjects such as space, ecology, geology, or human anatomy—all part of a special text2teach lesson plan. So far, the program, partly funded by Nokia, is being used by 938 schools in the Philippines and 200 in Tanzania.

M4G, which stands for Mobile for Good, is helping people in Kenya find jobs. For a video on the project, click here. More than 70,000 people now use the service, launched in 2003 and funded in part by the European telcom company Vodafone Group Plc. Some 60,000 have found jobs through the group's job service, Kazi560.

Next? Look for more people bartering their cellphone minutes for other goods and services in Mexico and parts of Africa, including the Congo.

The conference ends today.



(Photograph, Power Line Birds, by Patrick Herrera for istock.com)

Heat Wave 3

The Clinton Global Initiative ended today, unbowed by the U.S. economic crisis. Top attendees — which included some 45 global CEOs, 60 heads of state, scores of advocacy leaders, and even a few Hollywood entertainers—ended up pledging close to $8 billion for new projects that would improve the lives of some 158 million people around the world.

Some final highlights:

* British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke for a full 25 minutes (extemporaneously, without a teleprompter or cue cards), urging the construction of a "global civic society" and the increased use of the Internet and social media to fight for human rights. He also called on those assembled to innovate their 20th-century institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations to better tackle modern-day challenges of climate change, poverty, and global health and education gaps. Click here to see Clinton's introduction of Brown, followed by Brown's full remarks.

* Social media for social change got another nod at CGI when CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest, an initiative of the World Bank Group) pledged $10 million to create a mobile banking system for some 25 million people in 20 countries. CGAP CEO Elizabeth Littlefield called it a "mobile banking call to action." She said: "Millions of poor have been left out of the formal financial system; the brick-and-mortar branch bank system can only go so far." With cellphone service and a local shop handling the cash, she said, "mobile banking can reach every village and barrio in the developing world." Target countries include: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, and Uganda.

*Rene Preval, President of the Republic of Haiti, issued a moving, eloquent appeal for fast help rebuilding his flooded nation, ravaged in late August by Hurricane Gustav. "It's sad to say that if there are no dead bodies on the [TV/computer] screen, public opinion becomes disinterested very quickly," he said. "Important work remains to be done." Haiti's infrastructure needs to be completely rebuilt—but not, he said, so it resembles what it was before. "We need to build back better," he said—to better withstand what is certain to be more hurricane activity in the region in coming years due to the affects of global warming. "More than 90 percent of the crops in Haiti have disappeared in this recent string of hurricanes," Preval told a panel on poverty, "and in six months, we will not have any food to give to the population." Fellow CGI attendees Matt Damon and former Canadian Ambassador Frank McKenna (chairman of the nonprofit ONEXONE.org); Wyclef Jean of Yele Haiti, and past CGI attendees Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were among those who pledged more aid to Haiti today. More is needed, Bill Clinton said.

"There is a misperception of assets and opportunities in the world and a misalignment of how we invest our time and money and (build) the kind of future we all say we want," Clinton said in closing remarks. "We need to close the gaps between what we feel and what we see, and between what we say and what we do." The first CGI-Asia meeting will be held in Hong Kong December 2-3 and a "youth CGI" will be held at the University of Texas at Austin in February.

(Photograph, Graffiti in Sydney, courtesy 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)