Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Sound and fury, signifying nothing? Activism, Government, and Crowd-sourcing Schmrowd-sourcing

Interesting blog post from Jon Stahl here: "Chaotic, cacophonous, well meaning efforts that will inevitably add up to nothing" on crowd sourcing and the activism of the new generation, so to speak. Stahl and some people he quotes at length note the limitations of the "new" activism, Obama's millions-strong "constituency" and recommends some steps on real change -- including understanding that volunteerism, while laudable, will not alone make things better, and that philanthropy can't replace making the government work.

So interesting ideas. The post is a big old, but worth reading and ruminating on.

3 comments:

Daktari said...

Hey! Where's my comment?

Daktari said...

Grrrrr. Well, my well thought out comment seems to have disappeared into the abyss. Sorry. I'll have to be pithy another day.

Q said...

Guess blogger is still eating comments.

A tip: I always select-all and butterfly-C (ctrl-C I guess with a PC) before I hit "submit" on any web-commenting-form. It's actually good to do that as a "back up" in general, in case of crashing or human error ("hmm, I think I'll google that... D'OH! Navigated away from the comment page mid-thought...")

Freakin' blogger.