Pedro talks about social tools and social change
I missed this from my earlier post about Pedro’s wonderful workshop at LIFT, but thought I would share it now.
Pedro talks about the possibilities of social software tools and online communities and the possibilities of technology enabling social change. We are working on this all the time, and my practice is more and more focused on the use of both online communities and events linked to social innovation goals. I hope that we can get Pedro to come to Toronto for Mesh, I think he’d be a great addition to MeshU and a panel conversation.
March 5th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Wonderful elucidation from Pedro - it does indeed seem like we are all working on a way of contributing to the world in order to enable a “new way of being” that is differently integrated with our environments - whether they are social or natural in origin (and if we even choose to differentiate between the two).
Technology can definitely play the “glue” role in this - printing press was a technology too, after all, as was a plough / plow - we may simply need to “tweak it right”, perhaps, to keep on emerging through vision, communicate, and share through passion;
This is starting to look like something akin to a.. revolution of passion, of interconnectedness, and of the heart -
It’s curious that through technology, we are actually returning to the humanistic principles that we seem to have initially abandoned through our initial fascination with technology (science-fiction of the 80’s, anyone?), and an apparent mechanization of ourselves and of our society (universe is like clockwork) -
I suppose it is becoming apparent that we always embody our imagination (to “em-body” - to take not just the external stimuli, but also the structural paradigms, into the body, whether physical, mental or emotional) -
So why indeed not use imagination, through our passion, as channeled via technology, to embody something different and more aligned with humanistic principles;
In this way, the circle completes itself.
March 5th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Sounds like a guy who has the right idea, and I imagine he’d tried it out too. Much of technology could really be oriented toward community engagement, but the purposes are usually determined by management. Chomsky says that technology does have a big impact, but most of the time those advancements are spurred on in the pursuit of eliminating redundant personelle, or streamlining workflow.
I wonder how community commissioned technology would work. I suppose since books came out of a need for governments to manage their people, and later supplanted those very institutions, we might hope the same for microsoft excel.