Digital Good

Where to start? I guess a good place would be how I see the world. I try to be a good person, and I think that most if not all of the people I know are good people. But for a long time I have held this really negative view of the world. That as a collective, the human race is horrible, and we are on a downward spiral morally, socially, spiritually, etc. That we are a lost cause. Collectively, not individually, like I said. I think, on an individual level, most people are good people, but once you group them together the bad is greater than the sum of it's parts, if that makes sense. And when it comes to online interactions...whew, don't get me started. It's way worse online. Thousands of people hack the accounts and profiles of millions of people for personal gain. Racism, sexism, any discrimination really, is the norm in comment sections and discussions. People ignore pleas for help. That's how I've almost always viewed the social interactions on the internet. 

Now, neither of those outlooks is totally true. What I said is true, those things to happen, but I think that they were being misrepresented in my mind. I'm beginning to change my outlook. I'm not completely changed yet, but I've begun to change. 

We are amazing. And we are amazing to each other. People donate millions of dollars to charities and fundraisers. They volunteer their time and labor to help others. They are kind. And these things happen online too. I just didn't see it very often on either the internet or the "outernet." But I've started to see just how good people can be. 

I started to see this while I was on the sites Reddit and Imgur (pronounced image-er), who are sister sites. These are mostly for entertainment; Reddit has an educational/news side. I would be browsing through them, looking at cool stuff, when a post about someone who has gone through a hard time, or is asking for help, would pop up. At the very beginning, I would read these posts because I didn't know what they were about. Then I started to ignore them, they were all the same in effect anyway. But as time went on I started to realize what these meant. These were people, who probably didn't know each other in any way except through the website, going out of their way to help these other people through either money, or packages, or services. Once I sat down and actually thought about that, it blew my mind. These people genuinely cared for each other. Of course there were still people who couldn't care less, but the fact that these posts were some of the more popular, it showed that a significant portion of the sites population actually did care. 

Then, in class, we went over a number of websites and online services that aimed at helping people, like Kiva and Kickstarter. We talked about numerous cases of social media campaigns to help people with a number of different types of problems. Thousands of strangers, on a fairly regular basis, sacrifice to help each other out. Many times without any type of reward or benefit. And then I thought about it and I realized that I've always kind of known about it. How people really are good and do come together for good causes. 

I'm starting to change the way I look at the world. It's a good place, over all.