Redlining Online

Ivan Boothe wrote a terrific post last week about Causes taking down its application from MySpace. Causes is an application for use on social networking sites. it enables users to highlight causes that they care about asking friends to join their cause and also to make donations.

Since its launch in 2006, there are around 250,000 Causes on Facebook. A cause does not have to be associated with a specific nonprofit, and most of these, over 200,00 aren’t. They are people who are passionate about something, say the high cost of tuition or global warming writ large, and want their friends to know about it. That leaves about 46,000 causes that are connected to a specific nonprofit organization.I have written before about the meaning of Causes on Facebook.

Last year Causes broadened its reach to MySpace. By shutting down the application on MySpace, Causes is leaving about 184,000 cause enthusiasts out in the cold.  The number of users on MySpace was tiny compared to the reported 30 million active monthly users of Causes on Facebook. And, according to the Facebook Causes blog, the application has helped raise more than $12 million for nonprofits based in the U.S. and Canada. Over $5 million has been raised in 2009 alone.

This stirred quite a bit of commentary last week with very thoughtful pieces from Ivan as mentioned above, Amy Sample Ward, and Sean Stannard-Stockton. They noted the lack of robustness of the Causes application on MySpace compared to Facebook, the lack of conversation by and from Causes about why they made the decision, what it means for MySpace users, and the risk that nonprofit organizations take when they use third party applications like Causes to help build community online.

But there was one argument in particular that really resonated with me. When I first heard the news, I immediately began to think about a terrific, provocative talk that danah boyd gave last summer at the Personal Democracy Forum. It was appropriately titled, “The Not So Hidden Politics of Class Online.” Here is the video from her talk. She talked about the emerging online divides by race and class that are appearing, particularly the differences between the college-oriented people on Facebook and the non-college population on MySpace.

danah’s talk resonated with a post by Justin Maasa entitled “Social Networking Redlining.” Redlining was the practice of banks to steer their mortgages to people of certain races and ethnicities in certain neighborhoods. In other words, a way to keep African Americans out of certain neighborhoods was for banks not to lend them mortgages. This short post really summed up something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, the tension between the natural friending that happens on social networking sites that create cliques and silos and that can’t be avoided, and the institutional boundaries that are being created between sites like Facebook and MySpace.It is the institutional boundaries that nonprofit organizations should be fighting the hardest to try to breach.

Causes made a business decision, they were not making, or foreseeing, a return on investment for the application on MySpace. That’s entirely their right. The problem from a social change point of view are the number of nonprofit organizations that are shying away from MySpace in favor of Facebook. some assume from the popular press that MySpace is dying – it isn’t. Some assume that it isn’t cool to be on MySpace now. Or worse, they are focusing their organizational efforts towards Facebook because that’s where they hang out in their off time, that’s where their friends and family are socializing.

Social change needs to happen everywhere. Nonprofit organizations are charged with making it happen, intentionally, in easy places and harder places. MySpace may be a more challenging environment for some nonprofit organizations but it doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be there. Perhaps it means that they need to be there even more, to help raise awareness of issue, listen to what people are saying, and help to organize. Only by intentionally reaching out to communities that are too often overlooked will nonprofit organizations be able to help take down the boundaries that are keeping the voices of marginalized communities from being heard.

I’m glad that this issue was raised and led to a constructive conversation about the need for nonprofits not to overlook MySpace. Thanks to everyone for participating in an interesting dialogue.

 

 

Social Good Podcast Series is Up!

Social Good, the new podcast series I am hosting for the Chronicle of Philanthropy was just posted on the Chronicle site.

The topic this month is turning friends into supporters using social networking sites.  Jonothan Coleman of Nature Conservancy and Carie Lewis of the Humane Society are my guests.  Hope you enjoy it, I LOVED doing it!

So, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and if you have any ideas on topics and guests, just send them my way.  Thanks!

Change.org and MySpace launch “Ideas for America”

Change.org and MySpace have launched Ideas for America (or www.myspace.com/changedotorg on MySpace). The idea for Ideas is simple; post an idea for reforming government, get your friends to vote for it, watch your idea rise (or not!)

The top ten ideas will be matched with advocacy groups to follow through to try to make the ideas a reality.

So, want to shut Guantanomo Bay, eradicate global poverty, find a cure for AIDs, make sure every child is literate? Or maybe your idea is much better than that — let America know through Ideas for America!

The Dangers of the Connected Age

I was going to write a post on the outsized fear of the web versus the real dangers when David Pogue did it for me yesterday here. The bottom line, which I tell critics and skeptics all the time, is that dangers exist online, just as they do offline, and yes, that makes it scary, but it is a very, very small percentage of the amount of activity going on that is good and at times awesomely great.

Pogue cites the PBS Frontline documentary, “Growing Up Online” and what they found about teens online. What they found is that teens are immersed, I like to say marinating, in social media. No news there for anyone who has come into contact with a person under 30 in the last few years. And that sometimes, some of these teens either do mean things or experience meanness by others. The poster child for this meanness is the horrific story of the MySpace Suicide by Megan Meier, who was the victim of a hoax approved of by a neighboring teen’s mother.

I don’t want to excuse cyberbullying, it’s awful and mean spirited. But too many people use these rare instances as excuses not to engage with social media tools. It is too easy to dismiss them as dangerous or silly when they are, in fact, at the heart of a digital revolution that is changing everything that we do, see, hear and learn about. We are in the nascent stages of this revolutionary and norming expected behaviors very quickly — from not sending out too many joke emails to your friends and family, to making it very clear when you’re joking online since it can so hard to tell from text, to making sure to talk to your kids about the real dangers online and watching what they’re doing and where they’re surfing. It’s a work in progress — but it’s also a pathway that we need to take enthusiastically with open hearts and minds.

Very Disappointing MySpace Election

Just when you think folks are getting the power of social media and social networks, companies come along and suck all the life out of them. Six months ago, MySpace announced that it would hold the first presidential primary on January 1st and 2nd just prior to the Iowa Caucus. Cool, I thought, let’s throw some new century flavor into the dowdy primary campaign season.

Well, as noted here on TechPresident, what a disappointment! Here’s the link to it. It looks like a generic online survey that companies would use to get your email address. It has the feel of, “Are you for America, or really for America, or really, really for America? Click and tell us and you’ll win a lot of junk mail in your Inbox!”

The idea of allowing a vibrant social networking site like MySpace to hold the first online primary was so exciting. It could have been a way to engage, inform and legitimate the political views of millions of mainly young people online. It could have created online chats about the candidates, links to position papers and videos from the debates.

And, before the critics get chomping at the bit, I’m not suggesting that this kind of primary would or should take the place of the retail campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire but as a supplement, another way to get people involved in the process, Maybe this is a sign of the Murdoch-ization of MySpace, hopefully it’s just a huge lost opportunity. Sigh.