Posts tagged TED
Karen Armstrong on the Golden Rule
Mar 29th
Watch this video of Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God, speaking at the TED conference in 2008. Karen encourages religions to return to their roots in compassion and in calling their constituencies to action in the name of compassion.
You get a sense that Karen is a little frustrated with the direction organized religion has taken. She also is a hopeful person though. And her sense of urgency regarding compassion is obvious. For more on her sense of urgency check out the charter for compassion. More >
The internet depends on random acts of kindness to function
Oct 20th
I am always looking for new ways of describing to people what foyble is. Of course I have my trusty talking points. I deploy my elevator speech whenever possible (but rarely on actual elevators). I refer people to the what is foyble tab on the website. And we love bragging about the what is foyble video. We frequently like to use metaphor and analogy in our description of what we think foyble is and what it means to us.
During my research for what was going to be a post about some random act of kindness in the news I came across the below imbedded video. It is a talk by Jonathan Zittrain from this year’s TED conference. Jonathan is a Law Professor who teaches at Harvard. Read more about him on his bio page on the TED website.
It turns out the internet itself is the perfect metaphor for foyble. There is a lot of content that is produced, police-ed, and proliferated on the internet by people and organizations that have no obvious benefit for contributing to the content. Wikipedia is the most obvious example of this. The video contains some nice examples of how Wikipedia works. It drives home the notion of user generated content and demonstrates just how deeply involved the people who contribute to Wikipedia are.
Jonathan’s premise that the internet depends on one random act of kindness after another to function fits in nicely with what we believe the internet is. We believe that the internet is people. That despite all the popular criticisms of the internet- that it is filled with spam, and pornography, and viruses, and opinions disguised as news- that it really is just a fantastic interactive content generation mechanism that everyone owns. And since we all own it we all get to decide what content gets posted. And if we can’t decide what gets posted we at least get to help decide what is popular.
So that’s why we created foyble, because you should be able to use the internet to tell the world about your story, about your organization, and what you’re doing so that people can be inspired by the good that you’re trying to start.
Zittrain ends with a quote that I’ll take some license with and mash together just a little for effect: “the internet isn’t just a pile of information. it’s not a noun, its a verb. …that information is saying something to you…it’s saying: let’s march.” I like that. Help us help you use the internet to do your marching.
posted by Brian
