Play to Donate
Several years ago, I remember a site several of my friends told me about and encouraged me to visit. It was a site where you answer simple trivia questions, and for every trivia question you get right, it meant that 10 grains of rice was donated by the website/sponsor to people in need (the UN World Food Program). Obviously, 10 grains of rice isn’t much, so the point was to answer as many trivia questions as you could. As I seemed to recall, if you got an answer wrong, that is where you stopped, and however many grains of rice you accumulated was the total of rice you ended up donating. I think you could play again, but you’d have to start over with a new donation. The game very much became like a competition between me and my friends; we posted how many grains of rice we had donated that day, implying our generosity and how smart we were. After awhile, I think several of us moved on to other things, perhaps unsure that our right answers actually led to any donations whatsoever.
As I started thinking about clicktivism, I remembered that site and started searching online to see if it was still around. Sure enough it is: freerice.com It looks like it has changed since the last time I was on there. You can keep playing, even if you get a wrong answer. You can change subjects that the trivia question is coming from (which I seem to remember it only being vocabulary based), and now you can create a profile and a network of friends on the site of people who answer questions to donate grains of rice. There are leaderboards, much like how my friends on our own created, that increases the competition to not only get more answers right, but show how those answers led to more grains of rice.
Something else I noticed this time that might have been there before (but I didn’t realize it), but there are several links on how you can donate more than just grains of rice, or how you can help other organizations or countries that are in need of food. Granted, the link is small, but it’s there. And perhaps this is the small first step in moving people beyond clicktivism. Get them in through social means: creating a competition that both donates something and creates bragging rights (appeals to our conscience of doing charity, and our self-interest), and point them to other places to do more if they feel so inclined.
And I want you all to know, I just donated 1040 grains of rice. Beat that!
Why We Tend To Be Slackers
It is only recently with the increasing embrace of technology and the Internet that slacktivism has started to flourish. Maybe we’ve always had a tendency to be lazy, but with the Internet we can pretend we are being efficient and doing something to affect the world at large. However, in all reality, we haven’t really done anything but sign a few online petitions or go to some charity websites or pages. After all it’s easier to do if it’s just a click away.
Megan Boler addresses this issue in her book Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times about why we lean on the Internet more and more to be our tool for activism:
Today many North Americans spend hours commuting to work. Life is work. We are fighting off the onslaught of information and it is not just the disappearing public sphere that makes true political engagement difficult. In the United States, people work endless hours. How do you squeeze in activism in this precarious situation? The Internet makes it in many ways easier to engage (p. 357).
So we’re tired. We work to make money so we can afford to survive, and sometimes we just don’t have enough time, energy, or resources to also participate in organizations that require us to act on something. The Internet then allows us to easily “participate” in these groups and organizations, find out more about them, perhaps donate or organize (as is pointed out later in the book), all within the comfort of our home with us only exercising our fingers. But here is where our tendency to be slackers comes to play because often all that we do comes to a stop online and doesn’t go past or spill into the real world.
As Boler mentions (via criticis), “activism in virtual worlds… only detracts from real life activism. Entering Camp Darfur in [Second Life] users may have something like a cathartic experience that leaves them with the impression that they have actually done something about the issues when in fact they were simply sucked into computer screens for hours” (p. 361).
We click on a few pages, read some information online about the organization, feel good about ourselves for becoming more informed, or perhaps we donated some money via PayPal, and then call it done. So often, however, organizations (both political and non-profit) need support in real life, more than just online. We need to find a way that gets more people to take what they find or see online, and bring it on the streets to cause real change. It is possible and it has happened, but it shouldn’t be such a rare occurrence as it is now.
We must find ways to combat slacktivism so that people can do more than just click on some websites to really make a difference in the world. It’s okay to find out more information and donate online, but it’s time to do something more; “it’s time for complexities and radical hybridity” (p. 361). There must be a way to use the Internet and still create social change and do good in real life as well, to help people still have time and energy to be activists and still be working adults.
Let’s start by getting rid of Mondays. Who wants to create the online petition?
The Double-edged Sword of Cyberdemocracy
In his work “Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere,” Mark Poster remarks that in order to think and discuss democracy and the public sphere in regards to the internet, we must be more open to new possibilities and to think beyond our traditional views of what democracy is and what the public sphere is. One of his critics, Gary Hall in Digitize This Book (specifically the chapter called “HyperCyberDemocracy”), remarks that Poster is being a hypocrite in that despite Poster’s call to think outside the box, he does not do so himself:
Even though he encourages or even pushes us toward taking the risk that is implied by his argument–that the Internet may require us to think beyond current conceptions of the public sphere, democracy, politics, and even scholarly authority–he stops short of taking this risk himself (p. 184).
While he does make a good point, this is the double-edged sword of talking about cyberdemocracy. It is true that our traditional views of defining democracy and the public sphere limit and prevent our understanding of how they have changed or evolved when they become involved with the Internet. We do need to break through these limits and notions to really open up how we can view this “new” democracy. But herein lies the problem.
In order for any of us to understand what the other is talking about, we must give examples and use definitions that we already know and have learned. This holds true for any new concept, not just democracy. When describing something new, we relate it to something we already know. A teacher builds on the knowledge a student has already learned by showing the connections between the two. Jesus Christ taught in parables because it helped his audience understand the concepts through telling stories that related to things they already knew.
Even Hall himself points out that it is practically impossible to have a new theory without relating it to past concepts and restrictions:
In fact, if politics on the Internet were absolutely new, it would be unrecognizable, since (as we know from chapter 3, and Derrida and Weber’s work on iterability) in order to be able to cognize something, we already have to be able to re-cognize it, that is, re-peat it, see or take it again, to be able to compare and assimilate this “new” object to that which is already known and understood. … [A]ny such responsible, hospitable opening to the political other would challenge the very modern, hegemonic, technologically determinist, and democratic ideas we depend on for our sense of the political (p. 180-1).
With that said, I think Hall is criticizing Poster for something that is beyond Poster’s control. In order for Hall to even be able to understand and criticize Poster and then explain why he thinks that way about Poster’s argument, Hall has to use and rely on the reader’s knowledge of democracy, the Internet, and the public sphere. Hall himself is guilty of the hypocrisy that he criticizes Poster about, but like he said it is “impossible to simply invent a new theory of politics” (p. 180).
And so is the double-edged sword of cyberdemocracy. We know we need to come up with something new and have a more open view and concept to define the internet and the public sphere and it’s connection and relation with democracy; however, we have to explain and develop this new concept using our old traditional views and definitions or else no one would understand what the heck we are talking about.
Man, if only we could hook up to the Matrix and instantly know everything.
Superman Is You
While looking around us at the state of the world and what society has become, many of us wonder why it’s so crappy. We wish and long for someone to come along and rescue us from the destruction and chaos that we have inflicted upon ourselves. We want a superhero to come and clean up our oceans like Captain Planet, or stop all of the corporate goons and villains from ruining and corrupting our Gotham like Batman, or maybe even reverse time like Superman. Unfortunately these superheros aren’t real, and no one person can swoop in and fix all that is wrong with the world.
But, what we need is not some stranger to come in and save us. What we need is us to realize that together we are stronger and together we can be the superhero that puts the world back together. Impossible you say? I disagree.
Perhaps the problem is that we have good intentions to make the world a better place, so we do things online like give to charities or become fans of nonprofit organizations on Facebook, but when it comes down to real, physical action on our part we flake out. We make up excuses because the work isn’t easy and we like the easier option of just clicking on something online because it makes us feel better about ourselves without having to put forth any real effort.
Or perhaps the problem is that our idea to save the world is too broad for us to formulate a plan and actions to produce that result. We cripple ourselves by thinking that because we can’t save the whole world, why should we bother doing anything at all? We don’t know how to get from where we are now to where we want to be, so we stay where we are. We need someone or something to show us the little steps that we can all work on together to help us achieve our ultimate goal.
In comes IfWeRanTheWorld.com to the rescue! Here’s how it works:
With the help of this website to bring us together, we can click on things that help us see the steps from point A to B. We can see these microactions and think to ourselves, “Yeah, I can do that. That’s pretty easy.” But the site helps us get away from our clictivist/slactivist tendencies because for some microactions it will require work–not so much it will be overwhelming, but just enough that we will rise to the challenge. I’m hopeful that the more of us that help and contribute to each other’s microactions and ideas, the closer we reach the goal of saving the world.
Because after all, you are our Superman. Save us.
Panoptimism Today
When I was in high school, all of my friends and I used to joke about how much our school felt like a prison. It was probably was because we felt constrained as teenagers, but a great deal of it had to do with the building. Almost all of the classrooms were on the inside of the building without windows; it was very rare to have a class that did. Then every classroom had one door to enter and exit into the hallway, but each room was separated from each other. Most times, the door had a window right next to it looking out into the hall for other teachers and administrators to look into the room. In the center of our school was the cafetorium, and right next to it was the principal’s and other administrator’s offices. While it wasn’t exactly a tower in the center of our school, and it was only two stories, in many ways it resembled this:
Panopticon used in an Illinois prison
This is a panopticon, originally designed by Bentham, that is used, mostly in prisons, as a way to keep surveillance over the inmates. Michel Foucalt in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison describes the design and use for the panopticon in greater detail and how it invoked a sense of “panopticism” that has been infused in our current governmental and disciplinary systems.
The key to the panopticon is that everyone is in their individualized cells, separated from each other, and can clearly be seen by those who are in the center tower. However, the individuals in their cells cannot clearly see those in the tower, so they are never sure if they are being watched or not. The important principle that is instilled in these prisoners is the fact that they can be watched at any time.
Now, we have progressed away from the physical building, to that of a society in which holds these same principles in the theory of panoptimism. Today, especially with the greater use of the internet, we have made ourselves more individualized, and made it easier for others to see our daily interactions and goings on. However, we still have a notion that someone, be it our friends, others in society, or the government, may also be viewing our information. We don’t know if they are looking at it right that minute, but we know they can. For the most part, we are encouraging this. We want others to see our status updates, where we check-in, and what links we share, but we are never really sure who’s viewing the information and when or if there are other people we don’t know about viewing it as well. And, because we never know when they are or aren’t viewing the information we are putting out there (and because our data is stored forever), it is an ongoing feeling of being watched, Fouccault’s ideal scenario:
An indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed…. The practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’ is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures.
Panoptimism has penetrated all of our institutions and principles and discipline have become instilled in us. It helps maintain order and makes us more productive. But, being observed is a natural extension of that system, because it ensures that we remain productive and in order. The problem is it makes us all feel like we are in prison: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
missnesbitpro
Miss Nesbit's Philosophies 
