This post is in line with thus year’s blog action’s day theme of poverty. So how can social media or web 2.0 solve poverty?
Although i had images of homeless people living on the street, kids searching through piles of trash and beggars and tramps roaming around as poverty. But first, let’s define poverty. You can see the various definitions here and for convenience sake, I’ll pick 1.
The state of living on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank. Poverty can also represent a lack of opportunity and empowerment, and bad quality of life in general.
Now let’s head back into Singapore then, apparently our Population below poverty line is NA%. And its been said that the poverty level is measured by a monthly household income of $600 or less per household to be considered poor.
But what this doesn’t address is per head in the household, whats the income they’re receiving? So if i have one guy in the house earning $500 monthly, he’s poor and gets help. But if i have a guy earning $900, and has to support 5 ppl, each person gets $180 monthly… Now tell me, who’s worse off?
I’m not blaming the government here because i think they’re doing everything they can with their limited manpower. But shouldn’t we review this poverty level?
So back to the question, how can we use web 2.0 to solve poverty? Being a medium which is able to generate feedback, the one obvious way address the issue would be raising it in blogs like this and through campaigns like blog action day.
I chanced upon Andrew Tan (Soical Worker) and his post on poverty in Singapore and who’s responsible?
He proposes minimum wage guidelines due to ever increasing cost, just another way to solve the poverty issue in Singapore. Some comments included cause and effect scenarios whereby each individual is responsible for their own actions. The post itself includes links to other areas of discussion.
So with suggestions being thrown around, it might not be imposed, but the one thing that is going on is that it can help to address the issue in a real and direct way. Quite honestly, I’m sick of fund raisers on tv and while Edelman’s trust barometer points towards growing trust in NGOs, NKF and other NGOs frauds over the last couple of years have put a dent on the trust people have in these organizations. While i love a campaign with a good CSR dose, some of it is being overdone…
But what ppl forget is that these organizations are not THE ISSUE. They represent an issue which they believe in and ppl have to remember that at the end of the day, it’s the issue that they have to deal with. And in this case, poverty needs to be dealt with and not get caught up in the media hyped sensationalized news of frauds…
I propose web 2.0 to be a platform to raise awareness of the issue and allow a healthy discussion of solutions. 10 brains are better than 1 and the more people are aware, the more we can do something to help with the issue of poverty in Singapore.
What do you think social media evangelist? How else can we use web2.0 to help poverty in Singapore?
Not to be too harsh but I was disappointed with your post since this is what many marketers are already doing each with very different approaches and very different results. The article made me hope there was a howto of this for the common poor person, not a reinforcement of what’s been said already.
It’s a fair critic, i admit i wasn’t in the right frame of mind as i was posting this.
Could you share what are some of the marketers doing with their varied results?
Not to disappoint you, here’s a link to Priscilla’s blog, a social media blogger, who shares her views on poverty too.
http://priscillatan.com/2008/10/15/blog-action-day-stand-up-take-action/
I haven’t really been following the scene myself but they mostly do what marketers do. That is create networks, micro-blog, write articles, join social networks. All basic stuff unrelated to poverty.
The varying results just come from how well they sell their products. I remember some term back then I read from an Amazon review but I fail to recall it. It’s basically an attempt to create a grassroots community where for a set amount of time, random people in a community are asked to share what they consider are problems and after the amount of time, they share this with this community and then the process starts all over again.
There’s also the popular concept of Citizen Journalism which is just another way of spreading awareness rather than in relation to poverty.
Mostly all I know is the proponents are often either from the tech part of the educator’s side where they try to alleviate Web 2.0 communication with teaching like Ulearn08, OpenCourseWare and other collaborative stuff or…I’m forgetting the term but I think it’s close to synonymous with Tech Prophets (just made that word up) where they predict a problem and then experiment with collaborative community building.
I can see where u’re going with the vicious cycle of various campaigns being done to raise awareness but no follow through being there. But with the issue of poverty, it’s been around since the earliest civilizations.
Web 2.0 has raised awareness of issues at a faster speed with more people involved. However, to say that web 2.0 can be the ultimate answer for poverty requires a bigger question.
Can technology solve poverty?
Or do we need new reforms along with new technological advances? We saw how communism has failed for equality. Is capitalism the answer? Looking at the financial crisis, i don’t know…
Even with Web3.0 (Good write up here, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/whats_next_after_web_20_feedback.php), i have no idea where this new medium of smarter computers with more understanding of a problem can take this age old problem.
I think companies are doing what they can with increased pressure from NGOs due to increased awareness( by web2.0) to help alleviate the poverty situation, but any campaign is an uphill, and never ending task, unless the company becomes a social enterprise.
Just a heads up, if you want to get a preview of Web 3.0, try Diigo.
For me it’s not so much the question of can technology solve poverty but what tools are there that are simple enough that you can introduce it to the poor and what guides can you give them so that they can utilize these tools to ask for help.
I’m really not that much for altruism. For me, it’s much more important to share a process so those that need help can not only ask, but optimize their question close to the level of a marketer than it is for those that know how to ask to talk about these help because often times they don’t get what the person looking for help needs, only that they want to help but also because to me, poverty is not truly a case of money but the ignorance to become an entrepreneur in a world that conforms you to a job as well as punishes you for not being able to communicate your problems well enough or clear enough to the right audience.
Interesting thoughts and I’m sure our discussion has been ongoing for centuries as to how we can help our fellow men who are less fortunate than us.
It’s always and will be a struggle for them. To barely keep their minimal day to day jobs and trying to offer them a solution which requires their efforts as well might make it reluctant for them to do it.
Well…err… this is kinda uncomfortable but not to sound arrogant but I do feel like I’m one of the less fortunate rather than on the fortunate side that’s why I am curious about this subject because you could say that I feel like I’m one of the victims and I could use that as testament to the challenge that the less fortunate/I encounter. That said, I don’t see myself as having a victim syndrome rather I feel that I’m sick and tired of the “cliche”‘d help that society gives that is more welfare than foundation.
I’d just like to clarify though that I’m not poor as in, “in poverty” so that takes away some of the merit that I said but I also feel that’s exactly part of the problem of this society. There’s always a convenient excuse for those who don’t want to help to justify their lack of will to truly help as opposed to satisfying their conscience that you always have to wait for the even less fortunate guy with the more stereotypical suffering to come up and say something and then it becomes another discussion of why the other guy has merit which prolongs basically into a long “No” with insults.
You might be interested in this recent article by RWW
5 Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People who don’t use Social Media
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_ways_to_use_social_media.php
Plagiarist: Apologies for the slow reply, just reformatted my com and its been a nightmare. Thanks for the link, its a wonderful read. I get where u’re coming from regarding the welfare help and building a solid foundation help.
I’ll be honest, i have no clue how the issue of poverty can be solved unless man forgets greed and embraces charity. In an idealistic world, that would have been perfect but given the chaos we live in today, i can only hope our children will be the one to start the ball rolling. Maybe digital media as a medium will play its role in having a more solid and impactful approach, but till then we can only speculate and see…
Don’t worry. I use Co.mment so it alerts me anytime there’s a new update.
I’d also like to share with you a different opinion, maybe an opinion that’s been kept non-mainstream by the media as they pump all the humanitarian celebrities around and that’s that greed isn’t the root of poverty nor is charity always the key.
There’s more to this quote but this is what I have available:
“Why would greed lead you to make bad, risky investments? Greed should lead you to make sound, profitable investments. Unless you know the government will bail you out if your investments fail.”
and for the problems with charity, I urge you to watch all of the TedTalks videos with African Americans in them and see how some tell the story of how humanitarians helped prolong the suffering of those in Africa by pretending to be working together with the United Nations and other outside help while in reality taking the money for themselves (of course they need to make it look like they’re helping so they spend the money on superficial help like road building) and how they say that the key is in the Free Market.
Exhibit B would be how the Americans think they’re helping the Iraqis by spreading democracy over the century. I recommend Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis which should be available both via p2p and google videos.
Exhibit C would be the recent economic crisis in the United States. This ones’ controversial but if you judge it by those who predicted this crisis (most of them Austrian Economist and in fact the first one to sound this in the mainstream was the Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul during the primaries before the crisis went mainstream), the reason why America’s crisis got this bad was because instead of letting the system fail and taking the losses, the Federal Gov’t prolonged the crisis and provided “charity” towards the economy and the entire market pretty much and the bailout is another “charity” like solution to the problem.
I say controversial because these Ron Paul has hit the internet so much that most of the dedicated fans have been cult like around them and they end up making it look like he’s endorsing them when they were instead repeating his key points and this makes anyone who says his name a lunatic of sorts. Doesn’t help that many of his cult followers retort back in the same manner.
One often quoted aspect is how the Gold Standard isn’t perfect either which is a misquotation of his personal beliefs as he have many times clarified that it’s not about going about this overnight agree or disagree with him but it’s about not only cutting taxes but cutting spending.
This sounds irrelevant to what I’m saying above but I’m just pointing this out as you will meet many of these focusing on Gold Standard fanatics on both ends if you do try to research Ron Paul.
Edit: that should be the corrupt African gov’t helping together with outside help through humanitarians.
Edit: these Ron Paul “supporters” have been cult like