Mobile Volunteering Is Toss – But In A Good Way?

Yesterday, mobile operator Orange told us about a plan to crowdsource volunteering – getting customers to do useful work in the odd five minutes they have at bus-stops.

Obviously, this is the most irritating kind of self-promoting “social media” wank, and we agreed to think no further about it. But the idea niggled in my mind.

What if there is something in this?

Snack-size volunteering

Orange’s mobile volunteering scheme calls for projects that let users “turn down time into good time” with “snack-size volunteering”, which lets consumers “volunteer anywhere, anytime” – a concept it says can generate hundreds of thousands of extra hours of volunteering in the UK each year.

The idea is pretty vague at this stage. The site basically offers Orange’s infrastructure to charitable ideas, and has some pretty nice-sounding suggestions, including letting users map wildlife using their phone’s camera, mapping local resources to help people find things, providing audio snippets for blind people, and offering free market research to charities.

It follows on from Orange’s “RockCorps” which entices young people to help paint buildings and do similar jobs, in exchange for gig tickets (this year including Lady GaGa, Snoop Dogg and Pendulum).

But the idea behind mobile volunteering is that users don’t have to physically show up somewhere: they should be able to offer their time wherever they are, using their phones.

As is the rule with social media, it all feels thrown together. Orange hasn’t come up with anything very specific, because it is crowdsourcing ideas. It wants suggestions for things consumers can do from their mobile, wherever they are, using spare time and (I suppose) no money.  The top ten suggestions will get developed and funded by Orange, and turned into apps.

Like RockCorps, this is obviously self-promotion. We don’t believe Orange is doing this purely altruistically, but because it believes it will benefit from the publicity.

It’s also, we’re sorry to say, probably wank. It’s pretty likely that nothing will come out of it, except a small number of people massaging their egos and showing off to each other.

Harnessing the cognitive surplus

And yet, and yet. All of culture, from cave paintings to Maxwell’s equations and the Mona Lisa, has been produced in situations where people have more than basic survival to think about – in some sense, out of our collective “spare” time. Philosophy, science art and technology emerged from our collective “leisure”.

Right now, the human race has a Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky argues in his book of the same title, reviewed here in the Guardian. For the last fifty years, we’ve been passively using our excess brainpower consuming TV but – as an optimistic futurist – he believes that could be changing. Indeed there are statistics which say that young people are actually, for the first time in years, watching a decreasing amount of TV.

In the last ten years, we’ve spent 100 million hours collectively, building Wikipedia, for instance – but the potential is far greater, since that figure is roughly equal to the total time Americans spend watching TV adverts in the course of one weekend.

The Internet, whether mobile or not, allows us to spend our cognitive surplus more actively. Arguably it could also be more productively, of course. Much of what it produces is Lolcats and, yesterday, large parts of the Internet spent a lot of time reading a girl’s resignation-by-photo – followed by massive discussions about whether she was “genuine” or not.

That particular story, by the way, carried another massive illustration of our cognitive surplus: one of her issues with her boss was that he spent 29 hours a week on the addictive time-sucking Facebook Farmville app.

From the point of view of a hard-pressed subsistence farmer, a lot of the activity which has – eventually – produced our culture would look like nothing more than wank.

I guess it’s just possible that valuable stuff is going to emerge from this latest outburst of it.