Social Media for Social Good

For the last one and a half years I’ve been working on launching Transition Silicon Valley. It’s meant to be the Silicon Valley branch of the Transition Towns movement. The work is paying off right now in that we’re running a movie series called “Films of Vision and Hope” that’s drawn about 50-60 people per night. The overall message is there are a doom and gloom scenarios in the area of peak oil and climate change, and it’s easy to remain stuck there and not move into positive action. It’s an awareness raising exercise through which we’re hoping to find some people to join with us in building a credible movement. There are plenty of movies to show that give gloom and doom pictures but instead we’ve chosen movies with a positive vision and the theme is to stay in movement towards the positive vision rather than stick with doom and gloom.

At our event last Friday what stuck with me is the number of people who are working alone developing visions of a better way to live. But somehow those visions don’t get exposure to a broader audience and they’re affecting maybe the one person and a few close friends. I’ve certainly been in this place for years and know about the frustrations I feel.

It seems to be there are plenty of people with vision or ideas about better ways our society could be living. …BUT… There seems to be little way to implement the vision and produce positive social change.

Hence our ideas about a better way to live meet with obstructions such as

• The totality of the problem - can become frozen in “it’s too big for little me to understand or solve”
• The futility of fighting “The Man” - a.k.a. “I fought the Law and the Law won”
• Funding - In our scant free time between working full time and family or social life, how do we create enough time to make anything but minuscule impact?
• Diversity of opinions - Not only are there plenty of people with visions of a better way to live, but not all the visions are compatible with each other

I’m curious about ideas others have about this…