The Slacktivism Card

I was invited to weigh in this morning on WNYC's The Takeaway about the ongoing backlash against KONY2012, the cause video from San Diego-based Invisible Children that went crazy-viral this past week. The 30-minute video, about African warlord Joseph Kony and his crimes against children, has been watched and shared by more than 100 million people worldwide in just six days and set a Web record for speed-sharing. Directed and narrated by IC cofounder Jason Russell, the video is many things, but chiefly a call to arms for a new generation of would-be activists, and an experiment in social media strategy aimed at raising global awareness of Kony and bringing him to justice.

As a cause marketing video, KONY2012 is really, really good. (There. I said it.) It has been deeply engaging for the viewers it targets. And it's an emotionally captivating piece of personalized storytelling, well-written and clear in focus. Its effort to bring a global story home and make it personal, for its donors, is laudable. (We don't see enough of that in the aid sector.) And the KONY2012 campaign makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to participate.

Yet unlike most other cause videos being shared on the Web these days, the KONY2012 campaign has deeply riled the nation's aid sector establishment, which is both envious of IC's global reach, and, among other things, is alarmed by its chutzpah. Critics also have serious problems with the content. Included on the aid establishment's elongating list of Kony2012 criticisms are assertions that the video oversimplifies the story of its central figure, Joseph Kony (it does, but it is a cause primer for teens, not foreign policy journalism); that its young-white-San-Diego-filmmaker-pursues-black-bad-guy-in-Africa conceit smacks of American paternalism (among other things), and that the nonprofit funding the film, Invisible Children, has spent too much money on social media and technology (including high-quality video production) to track Kony's movements -- and not nearly enough to help the victims of Kony's terrorist army. There are more criticisms --some valid, and others not so much.

And now, as the blowback against this media-savvy, cutting-edge cause campaign enters its second week, critics have leveled their biggest salvo yet. They're calling KONY2012 an example of slacktivism -- suggesting that the KONY2012 video, the public protest of Kony's movements inside and outside Uganda planned for April 20th in cities around the globe, the fundraising "action" kits and celebrity-policymaker "influencer" networks curated to help galvanize the viral campaign are not important and ultimately, won't likely lead to much. The assertion is that the people supporting and leading KONY2012 are uncommitted actors who won't do much, ultimately, beyond frenzied video-sharing, to help IC achieve its mission.

Slacktivism? Really? It sounds oh-so-2008. Our world's communication landscape in 2012 has become denser, more complex and more participatory, with more opportunities to engage in public speech and undertake collective action. Isn't it time the establishment aid sector stop crying "slacktivism" each time a tech-savvy nonprofit starts making waves across the Internet? Might it be wiser to ask, instead, how our maturing social networks -- serving us, increasingly, as forums for collective action -- are providing new actors an important way to participate in civic action and politics, and, in many ways, are forcing a much-needed reshaping of the advocacy sector at large?

Here are some other points about slacktivism, from WNYC's Is Slacktivism the New Activism? segment this morning. (Disclosure: I teach social media strategy at NYU and am the author of a forthcoming book, Swarms: The Rise of the Digital Anti-Establishment, about the increasing use of social networks as tools of civic engagement):

* The concept of slacktivism is outdated, misinformed and condescending. It is a term that many in the establishment aid sector have started to use to dismiss the importance of new actors in the sector -- people not previously allowed in before the Internet and before social media lowered the barriers to participation. The youth targeted in the KONY2012 campaign are new actors. They are not slacking, nor are they philanthropy's traditional target group of High Net Worth individuals looking for a meaningful tax writeoff. Invisible Children's stakeholders are mostly young people, born digital. Like most of us, they don't want simply to watch videos about awful things. They want a world in which there is a way to engage, and social media give them that opportunity to get involved, signal disagreement, and advocate for behavioral and social norms.

* The concept of slacktivism dismisses the role of social networks as important signals of public preference and intent. People who are barely committed to a cause will never be able to click their way to a better world. But that does not mean that committed people cannot use social media effectively. As we've seen with recent, ad-hoc groups forming quickly on line to protest the Komen Foundation's attempt to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, or to speak out against Rush Limbaugh's incendiary comments about a Georgetown University student, or to support the Stop SOPA movement to preserve Internet freedom, committed actors -- everyday people with access to influential social networks -- can use social media effectively, not as a replacement for real-world action but as a way to coordinate it.

* Online groups that use social media to achieve a goal can be effective. An Internet firestorm, in just three days, was able to force Limbaugh to apologize -- twice -- to the woman he'd called "a slut" during his incendiary broadcast and he has lost nearly 100 advertisers. The anti-Komen protest swarm that was organized online to protest the breast cancer charity's decision to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood forced a reversal of that decision and led the woman behind the brouhaha to resign. The Stop SOPA campaign was able to delay a vote on legislation to diminish Internet freedom, at least for now. This isn't Slacktivism. This is new form of activism that has used social media to coordinate swift action around a specific goal.

* Organized social networks don't need permission to act. Invisible Children has been launching videos and mass demonstrations around its mission to stop Kony since 2006. Russell and cofounders Laren Poole and Bobby Bailey made Invisible Children, a 2004 documentary film about Kony and his child soldiers that first screened in June 2004 in San Diego. The following year, the trio founded Invisible Children as a nonprofit and on April 28, 2006, it staged a massive demonstration called Global Night Commute across 126 U.S. cities, in which more than 80,000 people walked to their city centers and slept in the streets to make a visual call to end night commuting in northern Uganda. The following year, in April 2007, IC hosted its second nationwide event, during which more than 68,000 people gathered in 15 U.S. cities to experience, for one night, what it was like to be displaced. Last April, 91,355 supporters went silent for 24 hours and in doing so raised close to $2 million to help Invisible Children build radio towers to help protect remote villages inside and outside Uganda from Kony-led violence. There is little to suggest that KONY2012 will fail to again mobilize young people in April and raise more funds for the African victims of Kony's army. With KONY2012, IC is seeking to globally scale its social media strategy for organizing public demonstrations and broad-scale fundraising drives.

The bottom line here? Thanks to social media, the aid sector establishment is no longer able to control the conversation, nor say who gets to be at the table. What really makes KONY2012 so provocative and, frankly, so unsettling to so many, has less to do with Invisible Children and its latest video and much more to do with the ability of new players in the advocacy sector to work collectively -- and successfully -- outside the sector's long-established structures to identify alternative goals.

The Internet is rebalancing power and reshaping the status quo throughout society, and the transformation within the cause sector is just getting started. That is the big story to watch. KONY2012 is just another wake-up call.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration, above: Invisible Children's Facebook page)

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)

Am I a (4) Square?

I’m a big fan of social media but I have to admit: I’m having a hard time getting into the habit of updating my whereabouts. Part of it is that my life just isn’t all that exciting: if there were a badge for Yet Another Before-Dawn Hour Spent Writing A Book or a badge for Marathon Blogging or Watching Rubicon, I would have long ago been anointed somebody’s Mayor – somewhere. At least once. [Dan Fletcher, writing in the current issue of TIME magazine, quips that the idea of updating his whereabouts “is a bit too much like having a pint-size version of my mother in my pocket, constantly prodding me for updates.”] Indeed, it’s kind of like that Twitteleh video that went viral last year spoofing Twitter, in which the Jewish mother uses tweets to prod her son with endless queries asking, Where Are You Going? Who Are You With? Are You Wearing a Sweater? and ... Who’s the Girl?

But a big part of it is that I just don’t see the benefits yet – at least not in the social change space. Sure, some nonprofits are starting to experiment. Kudos to Earthjustice, a nonprofit public interest law firm in the Bay Area, which has been asking BART riders this summer to “check in” with them on Foursquare. For every check-in, one of Earthjustice’s major donors is pledging $10 to help the nonprofit’s attorneys fight environmental pollution. So far, so good: marketing manager Ray Wan says the nonprofit has raised more than $10,000 for the cause, and has brought a crowd of people to the Earthjustice Web site that didn’t know about the group previously. [“We’re getting some amazing buzz from this,” Wan told me last month. “It’s an easy way to get people involved in helping us to fight for the environment.”]

Maybe so, but it’s all still about phoning it in -- what people used to call “click-and-give” in the ancient days of the Desktop, or what people have more recently called Slacktivism, a portmanteau formed out of the words “slacker” and “activism.” Even new media visionary Clay Shirky, speaking on this year’s conference circuit, has cited what he sees as a stubborn gap between online chatter about social action and real social action offline – a sort-of “talk” and “walk” gap that has yet to be widely recognized, if not bridged. [And it’s no wonder, perhaps. Josh Williams, the co-founder of Gowalla, says his company is thinking about how it can provide value beyond just the check-in, itself. “Sharing photographs, telling stories about a given location or whether someone’s had a romantic date there – that’s where things get really interesting,” Williams told TIME's Fletcher.]

I, for one, am holding out for something more. While sitting in the lobby of Austin’s Driskill Hotel last spring, the real potential of this medium became clear. One minute, the Driskill’s lobby was filled with seated, lounging SXSW conference-goers and the next minute, everyone sprang to their feet simultaneously, as if heeding a digital dog whistle, moving to the exits en masse. What happened? They all got the “memo” via Foursquare, an update compelling them to go to the next After Party (and they did, like moths to flame).

I went, too. But I didn’t stay very long. What I’m waiting for is the day or hour or minute when somebody sends me an update that not only tells me where they are, but why I should be there, too. An invitation that gives me a chance to do something locally -- but something outside my "chill" zone, like handing out free meals at the local homeless shelter for an hour, or reading a newspaper to nursing home residents in my neighborhood (and on my way over, bringing them a box of their favorite cookies).

Sure, I could do this without a prod via Foursquare and Gowalla. But if someone at my favorite charity were to invite me right now in an update, chances are I'd actually make it there. Today.

Skeptical? Go ahead, nonprofits. Encourage me to go for the Mayorship of, say, The Greater Harlem Nursing Home or the Atlanta Union Mission. I'm confident that I (and at least a couple dozen of my 3,000 closest online friends – and then some of their friends) would be delighted to compete.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: Russell Tate for istock.com)

After Slacktivism

Who says social advocates can't raise big money and forge lasting donor relationships online for their causes? Today's South by Southwest (SxSW) panel on slacktivism -- more elegantly and formally called Debunking the Myth of Social Media Fundraising -- offered a rousing antidote to the notion of ineffectual, click-and-give philanthropy. Urban Dictionary defines slacktivism -- a portmanteau of the words "slacker" and "activism" -- as "a way of pretending to care while sitting ... in front of a computer playing WoW." Such detachment, the panelists asserted, is becoming less of a factor in today's cause-wired, text-aided giving arena: the outpouring of mobile contributions to victims of Haiti's January 12 earthquake and donor retention strategies being crafted to hang on to many of those donors over time should be proof positive that online giving has, at last, begun to evolve and inform even the most traditional philanthropy circles.

[Evgeny Morozov, one of the critics of slacktivism, wrote in a Foreign Policy Magazine article last fall entitled "From Slacktivism to Activism" that he is skeptical of numerous digital activism campaigns "that attempt to change the world through Facebook and Twitter." He said the desire to instantly connect with others online around ever-new causes poses a threat to more productive uses of time, such as brainstorming solutions to the world's ongoing problems.]

Combining research data with personal anecdotes, panelists Stacey Monk (Epic Change); Brooke McMillan (the Lance Armstrong Foundation); Donna Wilkins (Charity Dynamics), and Frank Barry (with Blackbaud, the fundraising software firm) made a strong case for the potential of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to raise money and awareness -- not simply as tools in one-off fundraising campaigns but also in efforts to build richer and more sustainable donor relationships across the socioeconomic spectrum.

There are dozens of commonly-held misperceptions about the use of social media in advocacy, the panelists said, and here are five of them:

Myth One: Social Media Aren't Very Effective. Not true, said the panelists. Social media can be effective in breaking down geographic boundaries, building communities of donors who otherwise would not be able to connect, and bringing in contributions from many more people than before. Monk says her nonprofit has raised nearly all of its money via Twitter, to build classrooms in Tanzania, buy school supplies for the students there and provide skills training inside and outside the classroom -- including social media skills aimed at helping them to learn more about other people from around the world. While the panelists agreed that using social media to fund-raise can take time, as it's all about relationship-building and not simply a matter of learning the technology.

Myth Two: Major Donors Do Not Exist in Social Media. Not true, said McMillan, and cited the example of @fatcyclist, the Twitter handle for a man who blogged and Tweeted to raise some $800,000 over the course of a year for Livestrong, Lance Armstrong's cancer research foundation. With social media, Barry said, "major donors" are no longer just wealthy individuals. Now they include individuals of all income levels adept at using their social influence online and off to engage others around giving to a cause.

Myth Three: No one Raises Money on Twitter. Guess again, said the panelists. For one, look at Twestival, the regional, national, and global fund-raising campaigns staged on Twitter to benefit a variety of causes. Then look at TweetsGiving. Both micro-blogging fundraisers have increased donations year over year, suggesting such campaigns are sustainable. To be sure, Monk said, "when you first get on Twitter you don't know what you're doing there." But soon, she added, you discover that "Twitter engineers serendipity" -- all sorts of connections that can be leveraged to raise money and awareness over time.

Myth Four: Building Community Does Not Help You Raise Money. Also not true, the panelists said. Social media campaigns allow nonprofits to reach new donors and build the relationships required to raise funds from previously untapped sources. Nonprofits, said Monk, "shoot themselves in the foot" when they put a "give" button on their Web sites. Causes need, instead, to humanize fund-raising by using social media to engage donors in the cause. "Authentic connections between humans create movements, and movements raise funds," Monk said. "...Social media should humanize the process of giving, not automate it." Storytelling, the act of humanizing your cause to engage donors, is critical, she added. "If the word 'donate' is in your Tweet, you're doing it wrong," said Monk. To emphasize the point, Monk says she writes the Twitter handles of donors on the walls of the classrooms they're helping her to build as a way of showing them both her gratitude and their impact, and it works.

Myth Five: Social Media Cannibalize Other Fundraising Channels. Au contraire, said Monk. "Social media are just additional tools. Donors want to be able to choose" the way they give money to a cause, she said, and sites like Facebook and Twitter give them the option to give in new ways. Besides, the panelists agreed, social media offer an effective way for causes to reach the hearts and pocketbooks of Baby Boomers, the largest-growing demographic using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. Both Wilkins and Barry said multi-channel fund-raising strategies proved most effective, citing a recent Blackbaud/Charity Dynamics study. One finding: organizations that use email effectively to fund-raise also tend to use social media more effectively, as well. "My job didn't exist a year ago," said McMillan, the social media evangelist at Livestrong.

For more on the subject, check out the study on social media in fund-raising released last month by Charity Dynamics and Blackbaud.

Still not convinced? Come to the NTEN annual conference in Atlanta in April to hear some opposing views on the subject and a debate over the challenges to online giving that exist. My panel on Slacktivism will feature Nancy Lublin, CEO of dosomething.org; Jacob Colker, Cofounder of The Extraordinaries; Wendy Harman, social media director of the American Red Cross, and Aaron Smith, of Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, which is conducting ground-breaking research on the use of social media by Generation Y. Hope to see you there!

--By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Jumpingsack for istock.com)

Slacktivism

Urban Dictionary defines “slacktivism”—a portmanteau combining the words slacker and activism—as the digital equivalent of lip service, “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.” Wikipedia cites these prime examples: the signing of Internet petitions, wearing wristbands with political messages, joining a Facebook cause group, posting issue-oriented YouTube videos, and taking part in short-term boycotts such as the recent Earth Hour, an online event held March 28 asking people all over the world to turn off or dim their nonessential lights for an hour to urge government action against climate change.

Not slacker-y enough for you? How about the move by many Twitter users in June to turn their profile photos green, so as to show solidarity with Iranian protesters? “I find it utterly baffling,” wrote Australian blogger Raena Jackson Armitage on heyraena.com, “that people believed that doing this would really, actually make a difference to anyone other than to themselves and their own fuzzy, warm feelings. ‘Oh yeah, I’m a part of the Iranian revolution. Time for a soy latte!’”

Increasingly, though, as social media become more strategic and new media emerge from the husk of the old, slacktivism is becoming a four-letter word, a kind of derogatory shorthand used by people to debate (and mischaracterize) online activism in general. (Evgeny Morozov, in a May 19 post called The Brave New World of Slacktivism, said that while the Web has made it easier to be an activist, the surge in virtual involvement might be keeping things from happening in the real world.)

The latest scuffle over slacktivism broke out this past week, on the Progressive Exchange listserv, one of the largest and most influential email groups for progressive activist leaders. The discussion arose in response to two pieces: a short blog post by Tamar Schiffman on the Global Fund for Children’s Web site questioning the effectiveness of social media as a cause-booster, and the reposting of Morozov’s piece in Foreign Policy.

“I’m super uncomfortable with the term slacktivist,” member Michael Connery fired off in response. “Along with Tom Friedman’s Generation Q, (slacktivism) is a term that has primarily been used to tar and feather Millennials for not conforming to a Baby-Boomer view of activism.” Second, Connery said, the term “implicitly ignores all the real-world activism that today’s young people do in their communities, as well as in the political realm.” And third, people who use the term “slacktivism…are not convincing anyone or doing anything constructive by painting with such a broad brush a generation or a style of activism.”

Ted Fickes, another member of the exchange, suggested “there is no ‘right (or wrong)’ way to do social change or do activism” and suggested that people who use the term “slacktivism” either don’t understand the Cause Web—or fear it. “Technology … can be overwhelming,” Fickes wrote, chiefly for “most/many advocacy groups that don’t really have their own ‘theory of change’ and are often blindly shooting away, online and off, without much strategy, hoping something hits and at least building a list (of activist emails) along the way.”

Madeline Stanionis, CEO of the San Francisco-based Watershed Company, an online advocacy and fundraising consulting firm, said that “slacktivism is totally whacktivism.” In the case of two Watershed clients (ACORN and Planned Parenthood), “traditional activism cannot respond quickly enough on a national level to deflect a concentrated, full-force hit job by the right-wing noise machine,” she wrote. Only rapid-response teams comprised of online supporters have been able to fend off the types of attacks being waged today on these groups. “The assertion that online activists are slacktivists with no influence is bunk,” she says.

Even danah boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, weighed in at one point. Boyd suggested that people who keep bashing Twitter and other forms of social media are underestimating the simple power of these platforms to convene large groups of people around any number of concerns:

I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It’s good for society. And what they’re doing online is fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable. They want to share their state of mind and status so that others who care about them feel connected. It’s a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn’t look down at it from outer space. Of course it looks alien. Walk into any typical social encounter between people you don’t know and it’s bound to look a bit alien, especially if those people are demographically different than you.

To be sure, it’s doubtful the slacktivism debate will simmer down any time soon. (There are at least a few panels being proposed on the topic for SXSW 2010.)

But here’s an idea, says Connery: Why not stop using the term?

There's no question that some social media strategies don’t always work (Project Houdini) and that some efforts, like Twestival and Smiletrain.org, continue to struggle with scale. In addition, some high-profile advocacy groups like Kiva and Lend4Health.org are still stumbling over new ways to manage transparency: at Kiva, a coalition of lenders is angry at the microlending site’s decision to start offering loans to small businesses in the United States, and their “revolt” online took founders by surprise. “It was stronger than we thought,” c0-founder Matt Flannery told the Mercury News. “(It was) a little more visceral and angry”—prompting Flannery and Kiva President Premal Shah to acknowledge the contoversy last month and admit the jury is still out on the U.S. program. [Meanwhile, at Lend4Health.com, founder Tori Tuncan was slammed with a similarly angry challenge—in this case, over her use of children’s faces and real-life stories online.]

But online activism is just getting started. For every survey that says Twitter is mostly irrelevant babble, there is an online fundraiser that’s using microblogging to raise tens of thousands of new dollars to the cause; for every 10 Facebook causes, there are at least a few new private Nings comprised of thousands of new members able to help each other raise money, support, and engagement around their needs in ways that no traditional organization could make possible. And thanks to the mobile Web, on-demand volunteering is just around the corner; the recent Facebook purchase of social media aggregator FriendFeed just made the potential for peer-to-peer cause activism much richer—and easier.

Make no mistake: there have always been legions of people of all stripes who prefer to “do” by simply writing a check or pushing a send button. But social media-leveraged activism? It’s many-to-many, online and off, a form of self-organizing and engagement that has nothing to do with playing small.

Still not convinced? Just ask Tamar Schiffman, whose post questioning online activism on Global Fund for Children helped to kick off this latest scuffle over slacktivism. Even Schiffman now acknowledges a shift in the conversation. “I would be heartbroken to see an end to sit-ins, canvassing, rallies and picket lines,” she wrote in a follow-up post on the Progressive Exchange:

These things inspire and bring communities together at the face-to-face, neighborly level. However, we can’t ignore the direction that online networks are taking us, and that they have value. I think many of the peers in my sector are reluctant to really take the plunge by igniting online communities and taking online actions, but I think that if you don’t take this active (not ‘slacktive’) audience into account, in several years, you will be standing outside at a rally of four people, while the dynamic and inspiring work is being done online.

—By Marcia Stepanek

(This piece first appeared on PopTech.com and is being re-posted here with permission)

(Illustration: Aviators are Awesome, by doodlemachine for istock.com)