League of Inveterate Poets

Posted By Foolish Sage on April 12, 2009

A popular series of commercials for a consumer credit company used the running gag of a group of barbarians invading everyday, modern situations, symbolizing what can happen to people when they don’t have sufficient capital to do the things they want to do. Just as the horde is about to begin their slaughter and pillage, one of the contemporaries pulls the sponsoring company’s credit card from his billfold, effectively thwarting the barbarians. At the conclusion of each ad, one of the invaders sneers into the camera and growls, “What’s in your wallet?”

Just as we need monetary capital in order to buy necessities or take a vacation or start a business, we need “social capital” to invest in doing good and making the world a better place.

When I first arrived on FriendFeed (see this post), I was a little bewildered. All I had to do was express some of my confusion, and a super hero swooped out of the clouds, offering help and encouragement. Techwag reveals his secret identity (not really a secret) and has this to say about Louis Gray:

How did you meet Louis? Honestly, can you point to a time when Louis Gray was not on the internet and building up groups of people? He has a tendency to pull in people who are very smart, and then let them go wild with ideas on his blog, or on their own blogs with his comments. For some people there is no internet before Louis (and before you get all snarky thinking that I am waxing poetic, read this blog entry), there is even a FAQ on the Myth of Louis Gray.TechWag, Apr 2009

Of course I’m being hyperbolic when I describe Louis Gray as a superhero. What he does on the Internet is hardly saving the planet from an asteroid or defeating a world-dominating evil genius. But it is intensely, wonderfully human; and that’s pretty “super” as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve grown a little weary of all the diatribes I’ve read recently about how the Internet supposedly detracts from “real” relationships and human contact. Certainly I agree that there is no substitute for embodied relationships. The Internet will never replace or substitute for what it means to engage a person face-to-face, not only mind-to-mind but with all that makes us human–very much including the irreplacable communication that comes from our eyes, our body postures, our facial expressions.

Nonetheless, I maintain that real and valuable relationship and human interaction can and does happen across the web, albeit in different ways from our valued face-to-face relationships. The Internet has opened up the possibility of multiplying the Good Samaritan exponentially every single day. Why should one of the best-known and most widely-respected tech bloggers stop his busy day to answer the question of a complete stranger, a continent away, on the faceless Internet? One might as well ask why did the original Good Samaritan stop along the road to help the wounded enemy of his people. The answer is love. And while love is most powerful when it is expressed in full human embodiment, there is nonetheless something very awesome when it is given away to a benefactor never seen.

An example of this that comes to my mind is my wife’s involvement with Kiva. Kiva.org uses the power of the Internet to foster microlending relationships between people in the developed world and poor entrepeneurs in the developing world. Put simply, Kiva enables anyone with as little as $25 to choose a poor person or group in any part of the world who has the desire to start their own business. If the recipient is successful, they repay the principal, which is then either returned to the lender or loaned out again to another project.

Projects like Kiva allow monetary capital to become social capital. And yes, it is “faceless” (very, very few Kiva lenders will ever meet any of their benefactors), but it is purely love, because there is on material return to the lender.

Examples could be multiplied of such investments of social capital on the web, some small in their impact (helping a newbie on a web service get something done) and others huge (amassing the voices of millions to call the super power nations to task for developing world debt), but all of them have one thing in common: selfless acts of love to total strangers.

What’s in your web presence wallet?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Using Social Media for Social Good: Announcing the results of our charity drive (othersidegroup.com)
• Kiva Alerts Make Microlending Information More Accessible (readwriteweb.com)
• Calling All Socially-Minded Techies; Kiva Launches API Platform (techcrunch.com)
• The First Kiva Mashups for Microfinance (programmableweb.com)

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Category: It`s All About Me
Tags: Add new tag, Blog, FriendFeed, internet, Louis Gray, social media