You’ve heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday of course—both signs and symptoms of our very modern consumerist Christmas. But yesterday was a day celebrating a different aspect of Christmas. And what Giving Tuesday lacks in a snappy name, it perhaps makes up for in heart. Google connected interested surfers to worthy charities on Google+, and Amazon—which surely made enough on Monday to buy either a third-world country or maybe a fleet of delivery drones—was “giving” $20 to its customers’ favorite charities (as long as they bought a Kindle Fire HDX, that is).
It’s hard to estimate how much was given on Giving Tuesday yesterday, with so many organizations and cities taking part. Last year—the first year of the effort—about $10 million in donations were logged by partnering charities. That represents about a 53% increase over giving during the same time frame in 2011.
But the fact that it exists at all illustrates one of the paradoxes of our Internet Age. The marvelous technology that, according to critics, has made us so much more narcissistic than we used to be, is also facilitating a new wave of charity and altruism. And it can go well beyond just giving a Facebook “like” to a worthwhile cause.
It’s breathtaking, really, when you think about the ways we can give away our money. I’ve donated to causes via text message and Paypal accounts. My own church tithes are subtracted from my bank account through automatic withdrawal, not a passed collection plate. Pop-up ads on nonprofit websites like ours remind you more and more often as the tax year winds down that you could digitally donate. Would any of this have been possible 15 years ago? I doubt it. Yet these days, it’s positively old school. There are now entire Internet platforms designed to facilitate giving. Read what Kharunya Paramaguru has to say in Time’s “Altruism in the Digital Age“:
Dana Klisanin, a U.S.-based psychologist, suggests that the Internet is indeed giving rise to new avenues for altruism. She refers to this as “digital altruism”—simply meaning altruism that’s mediated by digital technology—and suggests that it is an understudied area because so much media attention is focused on negative behaviors online, like cyber-bullying or cyber-crime. Klisanin has suggested three categories for various degrees of online altruism. This includes “every day digital altruism” where individuals click to donate to a charity, to creative digital altruism where users design websites or platforms to help others, to co-creative projects where groups or corporations come together to produce something for the “greater good”—like the UN working with online humanitarian volunteers to help with relief efforts following typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.
The story quotes Kwame Ferreria, who worked on a social network called Impossible, which provides a forum for users to both wish for something (anything from a better website to world peace) and those who try to grant those wishes.
“Most social networks have done a wonderful job of connecting people, but they consume each other,” he says. “You go through experiences and you ‘like’ things, but what about a shift, where it’s not about consuming but it’s actually about giving?”
And giving seems to be going up. In 2012, Americans gave more than $316.3 billion to charity. In 2011, that figure was around $298 billion. And while last year’s number is still less than the all-time benchmark of $344.5 billion doled out by Americans in 2007, one must remember that that was the year before the Great Recession hit. And even though the economy’s technically recovered since then, many families are still struggling.
None of this, of course, mitigates the more narcissistic impulses the Internet culture stirs up. We fret over how we look in our online interactions. We post our vacation pictures, tweet about our dinners and opine endlessly in our blogs. And, hey, I’m a part of this world: I do all this stuff, too. Indeed, we all think about ourselves an awful lot these days. There’s a reason why Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year was selfie.
And yet, there’s a lot of selfless behavior out there if we look. We may talk about ourselves more, but maybe we also listen to others a little more. We like. We follow. We form friendships. And we give away some of our money.
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