February 26, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World
by Tom Watson
This book tells “the story of what people do online to try to change the world for the better,” writes Tom Watson, a journalist, media critic, entrepreneur, and blogger.
He writes that rapid changes in interactive, online communications like blogs and text messages are changing how people support causes and “how we respond to that underlying human impulse to help others, improve our communities, and change the world.”
In the chapter “Friending for Good: The Facebook Philanthropists,” Mr. Watson writes about Facebook’s “Causes” tool, which was started in spring 2007. The tool lets users advertise a cause they support on their profile page, add their names as supporters of the cause, donate money, and solicit more friends to join the cause. In three months, more than a million users had signed up, and by mid-2008 the application had helped raise $2.5-million for a range of charities.
In other chapters, Mr. Watson writes about the phenomenon of peer-to-peer philanthropy, in which donors give online and the funds go directly to people who will use the money, instead of flowing through a nonprofit group. An example of this is the DonorsChoose Web site, where donors can send money to public-school teachers for a specific project or improvement in the classroom.
Another chapter, “From the Bottom Up: The Order is Rapidly Fading,” examines how blogging and other interactive efforts affect the political process, and how President Barack Obama was particularly savvy in his use of those tools.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 111 River Street, Fourth Floor, Hoboken, N.J. 07030; (201) 748-6000; fax (201) 748-6088; http://www.wiley.com; 272 pages; $27.95; ISBN 0470375043.
