Going Social in a Digital World is building a New World Order according to most contributors across the web, Is this really happening? What Kind of World Order?
Is it one where a social revolution in the Middle East blasts the gas price in the USA overnight?
Is this a ‘Good’ World order and does this interest the man of the street the one struggling to pay his bills, keep food on table and send his kids to school?
How do the demographics compare with internet users and Facebook users? (all data from internetworldstatistics)
World Population as of December 2010: 6,845, 690, 960
Total Internet users as of December 2010: 1.966,514,816 ( 28.7% of the population)
Total Facebook users as of December 2010: 517,760,460 (7.6% of the world population)
Facebook penetration as of December 2010: 28.8% (number of Facebook users out of the Internet users
So is the largest Social network a worldwide phenomenon? Yes with 7.6% of the population.
Does this worldwide phenomenon affect the daily living of the world population? When only 7.6% of the world population is using it.
How to reconcile the number of Facebook users and the mobile phone sales in 2010: 1,500,000,000, both reflect individual decisions to communicate…
Together we can make a difference.There are no other solutions since most of the government around the world are incapable of looking after and guaranteeing the future of their citizens. This is due only to problems in the existing political systems and government which will not and cannot change at the pace the world is changing. Revolutions will keep happening until all dictators are replaced by legitimate leaders who invariably will grow apart from those who gave them their positions.
Having lived for the last 25 years in 8 different countries across 3 continent and worked and visited many more with my job in shipping I witnessed the birth over the years of a true community awareness which knows no boundaries. This is due first to the vastly improved media coverage of world events by National and International TV networks relayed at the macro level by the social networks.
I recall visiting shop owners and importers in Yemen and Jordan during the first Gulf war keeping them informed on how we were going to deliver their goods coping with the exhaustive control of the US Coast Guard on all the shipping activities in the Red Sea.
At that time,I had many meetings in the 1990’s, which spread from the comfortable Singapore Office to the hills of Sri Lanka with the tea Growers to miniature shops in Yemen, from drinking a ‘Singapore Sling ‘cocktail in a fancy Hotel, to sharing one tea cup for six at a business meeting in Yemen with clients wearing traditional daggers with AK 47 on their lap.
There is one thing I learned, not speaking the local language in many occasions, is that people all over the world share the same concern and priorities for their family, i.e: safety, housing, education and a future for their children in a clean environment.
The purpose of this article is to build resources and awareness around the issue of improved sustainable living across various communities around the world.Improved because we will add a fourth R to the traditional three R’s.
Reduce, Re-use, Recycle, we will add Reunite.
If sustainable living is about being able to live together on one planet only, it is unthinkable to believe that individual actions spread over almost 7 billions individuals can produce a significant result. It is now possible with the renewed global community awareness to mobilize true and lasting resources from Companies, organisations and individuals.
Our project for an improved sustainable living will go through basically three stages aimed at building a portal of sustainable living covering all the subjects of our daily lives from housing to health, leisure, personal development, etc… In a word the Yahoo of sustainable living.
First step: Exposure and Attention
We need contributors and columnists willing to comment and analyze World global and local events and their relevance with sustainable living primarily, not from the spectacular angle like most media which attention does not last more than a week on any world event…once it is over. Regular columnists will be remunerated commensurately with the profitability of the blog; this is logic. Today the blog has no financial resources, yet.
Attention and traffic around the blog is the lifeline and the key to achieving the goals of improved sustainable living.
Second Step: Commercial support
We will seek support and advertising from companies which operate and produce in a sustainable way only. Companies where the ROI is as important as the ROH, (return on human) or EROI (environmental return on investment). This step is unavoidable as the blog is not an NGO or a non-profit organisation and needs profit to achieve its mission.
The blog needs resources to achieve the next stage.
Third Step: Social entrepreneurship
At this stage, with its own resources and collaborative investment, (an investment project where many small shareholders have contributions from $10 to $10,000), the blog/website will develop projects guided by the principle of social entrepreneurship. The projects will embrace all the values of social entrepreneurship with a 100% reliance on internet technology to create those values and a constant aim at linking the non digital communities and individuals to the exponential growth of the numerical world, which is our World now.
The gap between developed digital countries and developing digital countries is significant and alarming in terms of internet users, but it also reveals intense social networking for those who have access, as the numbers below shows:
Latin America Internet users: 10.4% of World Population with a 35% Facebook index (number of Facebook users compared to internet users)
Oceania/Australia internet users: 1.1% of the World Population with a 54.5% Facebook index
Africa internet users: 5.6% of the World Population with a 15.9% Facebook index
One cannot built and keep any community interest without relying on the social networks life Facebook, My Space, Linkedln, Plaxo, Twitter etc… and we will rely on them for our social entrepreneurship projects.
Project example:
Teach and train individuals living in under privileged communities to develop from home sustainable income trough digital work. This will be done trough a combination of sponsorship and business contracts with all the companies who will remunerate and benefit from the activities. Only companies operating with true sustainable policies will be selected.
The digital work will cover all aspects of education and training for all the members of the household, as it is not enough that one family member alone has access to the digital world and economy.