Moths are very important!Poor woman she has much to put up with. I explained the connections, and links in my moth eaten brain and why I had made such a statement. I won't bore you, having imposed such tortuous amblings on herself last night. She is long-suffering but nothing if not polite!
17. There is nothing more tedious than a social enterprise definition debate (apart from two of them…)and,
8. If a pound was donated each time a social entrepreneur quoted Gandhi, no-one would need to fundraisefor me that would be the mention of Muhammad Yunus and Grameen.
An invisible revolution has taken place is the way we use the net, but the increasing personalisation of information by search engines such as Google threatens to limit our access to information and enclose us in a self-reinforcing world view.A great danger to be aware of. The article argues further:-
In Bowling Alone, his book on the decline of civic life in America, Robert Putnam looked at the problem of the major decrease in "social capital" – the bonds of trust and allegiance that encourage people to do each other favours, work together to solve common problems, and collaborate. Putnam identified two kinds of social capital: there's the in-group-oriented "bonding" capital created when you attend a meeting of your college alumni, and then there's "bridging" capital, which is created at an event like a town meeting when people from lots of different backgrounds come together to meet each other. Bridging capital is potent: build more of it, and you're more likely to be able to find that next job or an investor for your small business, because it allows you to tap into lots of different networks for help.
Everybody expected the internet to be a huge source of bridging capital. Writing at the height of the dotcom bubble, Tom Friedman declared that the internet would "make us all next-door neighbours". In fact, this idea was the core of his thesis in The Lexus and the Olive Tree: "The internet is going to be like a huge vice that takes the globalisation system … and keeps tightening and tightening that system around everyone, in ways that will only make the world smaller and smaller and faster and faster with each passing day."The Big Society is currently being wheeled out as a producer and reservoir of social capital. Of course, cynically, it is a method to avoid investing real capital and providing revenue to run necessary services. Many vital services cannot be provided efficiently or effectively by volunteerism alone. Believe me I'm a volunteer. However, the model being put forward by the government is almost exclusively "bonding" social capital. My group, society or coop does not include you for whatever reason and so you will only benefit if we let you. As Pariser notes, we need more "bridging" social capital, we need to build the public and the civic domains as well as tending our own, Big Society, cabbage patch.
Friedman seemed to have in mind a kind of global village in which kids in Africa and executives in New York would build a community together. But that's not what's happening: our virtual neighbours look more and more like our real-world neighbours and our real-world neighbours look more and more like us. We're getting a lot of bonding but very little bridging. And this is important because it's bridging that creates our sense of the "public" – the space where we address the problems that transcend our narrow self-interests.
