- Sign-up for an Organ Donor Card
- Install the Organ Donor App on your phone
- Give Blood
- Organize a Charity Event on My Charity and raise money for Cystic Fibrosis
- Donate to GOAL
- Donate to Medecins Sans Frontiers
- Cancel your Sky Subscription and give that money every month to the Simon Community
- Join a democratic political party
- Volunteer to do Meals on Wheels
- Teach your elderly neighbour how to use the internet so they can be a Silver Surfer
- Figure out the difference between GMT and BST
Anyone else got ideas for how people can avoid pointless gestures and actually do something useful?
Take a minutes break from Twitter/Google+/Facebook/RSS/Blogs/Email/IM/etc. and contemplate the horror that happened in Norway.It is helpful to think about our fellow man and how you can make changes in your daily thinking to influence the global conscious for good. Think about our negative knee-jerk reactions to right wingers, left wingers, guns, religion, extremism etc. Think about how it was assumed to be Islamic at first and then turned out to be Christian. Think how that affects so many other decisions we make on a daily basis.Action without contemplation is blind and can do harm as well as good. It is too easy to drop a dime in the charity tin and then not think about it until next year. That doesn’t change much at all. But if you take time to think and change your habits on a daily basis you can create a big impact.A minutes silence without follow up action is obviously also a waste.
If you want to do something useful AND do nothing on your computer, you could donate your inactive computing time to help speed up scientific research – just choose a project from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
The problem is Paul that 99.99999999% of the people who take the minute will do nothing/zero/nada/zip afterwards. We get the same rubbish with earth hour every year. Any sign of our electricity usage going down? No, of course not.These special minutes/hours/days that are being invented on a daily basis give people an easy out. As for this nonsensical idea of an Online Community. It’s like asking the “Car Driving Community” or “HP Printer Owning Community” to come together. Paul Carr nailed this slacktivism perfectly recently:http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/11/a-community-of-dunces/
Neat idea Stewart. My donation of thousands of compute hours in the 90s sadly never found ET. This seems like a much more beneficial use of those CPUs.
If people really wanted to make a gesture – get off Twitter/Facebook for a week. Any nitwit can down tools for 60 seconds. But a week, that shows you might actually care. Too hard? Awwwwwwww.
First off, how many of us don’t stand in silence for a minute at a rugby or football match when asked? Ah sure it’s nothing and you’d been an eejit not to but lets not question that mass moment of utter pointlessness. I usually stand there wondering why my left foot gets pins and needles faster than my right foot. I usually have no idea who the poor chap we are standing in silence for a minute is. Do I look him up after the game? Eh, no. If anything I’ll have more to think about for this minutes silence for Norway than for any other minutes silence I’ve stood for in a cold stadium.All I’m saying is that lets not assume the minutes silence won’t do good. Lets ask people to think hard about it during that minute rather than automatically berate them for their stupid gesture. And yes, ask them then to take action after the minutes silence and do some real good. What happened in Norway is a terrible thing that requires some more global thought to tackle. Donating blood is good but it’s not the point of thinking about what happened in Norway.Think about Norway, think about what happened, think about your first reactions to it, think about what you could have done or what you still can do. Think about nationalistic friends of yours or your own nationalistic tendencies and think about how to change that.
I think the difference (for me anyway) is that at a football match or in any big group, the absence of noise is something very powerful, because of all the people, all being very, very quiet. It’s *something* – an active, willing silence, rather than just an absence of noise.Not posting on twitter or Facebook for a minute – that’s just not the same to me. It’s just not doing something. But each to there own. I probably will be taking part either unintentionally or because I’d feel too intimidated to tweet.
What happened in Norway was horrific. One nut-job killed a lot of people. But what “global thought”will tackle that? There are bad crazy murderous people in every country in the world. Some right-wing, some left-wing, some religious, some athiests. No amount of “hard thinking” will ever change that.
If that’s the case Stewart, then what we have on our hands is a mob, not a community. Which is ironic on so many levels.I’ll be cranking up the tweets to max in Bandon.
We’ll see what happens so… don’t want to get on the bad side of an Internet groupthink. It’s only a minute though – tweeting about kittens during it would kind of feel like pissing in someone’s chips.
Good point Stewart and while Friday’s event won’t achieve this I’d like to think we can bring the stadium feeling to the online world too. That instead of just 80,000 people going quiet we can feel 750 million people going quiet around one issue for 1 minute. Tough ask I know but it does start with the people physically around you and moves out to those you know well online and then further out. We were hoping to do something for Friday that “maps” it but I don’t think we have it figured out yet.
There are plenty of people supporting what the lone nut-job did. He is not alone.They need to hear our thoughts on it, know that we understand they feel threatened by globalisation but that their retreat into nationalisation is not the answer and that they can live good lives with their own beliefs without resorting to violence and repression of others. They will have to compromise in some ways but can, with the exception of some extremes, retain their living standards.The alternative is annoying them further and annoying the do gooders and annoying yourself and well that’s not going to help much either.
Good post Conor. Some very good suggestions for things people can do that actually make a difference.The twitter minute silence thing is pure slacktivism as far as I am concerned. Token participation so people can feel good about themselves and say they were part of something. Utterly self serving. If I may add another action people can do to help others, rather than themselves, the East Africa region is going through one of the worse droughts they have experiences in 60 years. Placing millions at risk of death and disease. People can contribute to the United Nations Human Rights Commission to help aid those at risk.http://goo.gl/dslME
The types of people who do horrible things like Oslo will be laughing their arses off at a bunch of online hand-wringers thinking they make a difference by going silent for 60 seconds. And that’s the 4 of them globally who are even aware it is happening.
Thanks for the link Chris. I meant to mention Somalia and that region. It feels like people only really care about stuff when it happens to those who are socially similar to themselves and when they have plenty of TV/newspaper/Twitter coverage of it.
Well Breivik and his type are not the cavemen we think they are, quite well versed in online techniques and online communities. Breivik did most of his proselytising online. They’ll be aware and the 60 seconds is for us to resolve to be better and take the challenge in person to nationalists we know. The fewer people they have to laugh with the better.Somalia is a terrible situation but we can’t throw food at them and forget the ethnic and nationalistic problems the country has. We need to work on both fronts to solve it in the long term. And change for good in one part of the world does affect other parts of the world.
“Oh look, all the people on Twitter from 17:00 to 17:01 want us to stop being baddies. Well that’s me convinced. Democracy and multi-culturalism it is.”Alternatively, here’s something that [a] involves getting up off your hole and [b] could work”10,000 people under the age of 25 joined mainstream political parties today so that they can actually materially impact the future of their country and their continent”