The Proximity Economy

This week's SoCap09 conference will serve again this year as Ground Zero for 800-plus social entrepreneurs in the world who are bent on using social media to invent a new economy -- one that's focused more directly on global problem-solving. "Americans are hungry to engage," says Jonathan Greenblatt, a SoCap presenter and president of All for Good, an open source platform that exists to press more people into service.

Greenblatt says we're living in a moment when social networking is evolving into mobilization, and brands are becoming increasingly focused on doing right by their customers' social networks. To be sure, many SoCap attendees heading for San Francisco this week believe there is, already, a new "economy of integrity" in the making -- fueled by social media. "This new economy is like shoots growing out of the ground," Greenblatt says. "It's giving us different answers than the ones we've heard before to the questions we are facing" as a society.

Think Zipcar, Greenblatt says -- the Netflix for cars. Or Living Homes, a Los Angeles-based construction business that's building homes that generate more power than they consume. Or Tom's Shoes, which will donate a pair of shoes to someone in need for every pair purchased. Or Revolution Foods, which is offering healthier meals to kids around the nation as an alternative to junk food in public schools. "This new economy of integrity is animated by these ethical brands driving values and creating values, and social media will allow this economy of integrity to take off," Greenblatt says. Social media, he says, will both "cohere this moment of opportunity and catalyze it...We have opportunities before us that were never before possible."

The biggest driver of this shift from social networking to mobilization, though, is not simply commerce -- nor even altruism. Historians and futurists suggest it's more about our increasing discomfort with the mass proximity we may now feel to communities and classes of people that previously lived outside our direct spheres of experience, knowledge, or influence. Thanks to social media, says Greenblatt, the old buffer zones that used to divide us are shrinking -- fast. "We have never been nor felt so adjacent to others," he told a group of online activists Friday at Mashable's Summer of Social Good Conference in Manhattan. With mass globalization, we can see the same brands being advertised in central Dubai as in Manhattan; our closest neighbors are more likely now to be found online, everything can be googled, and we have never been so mobile. "There is more computing power in our Blackberries than there was in the control room in Houston that put a man on the moon," Greenblatt says.

All of this, of course, presents both opportunity and burden. "In a networked world where everyone is adjacent and everything can be known, we are seeing increasing evidence of the inequities around us," Greenblatt says. "When you are actually adjacent to these people -- the have-nots; when they know what we have -- it puts a burden on the 'haves' [in society]."

Indeed, says Greenblatt and others, we are compelled to invent new alternatives. Futurist Mark Pesce predicts a dangerous time ahead, with new, Web-strong "adhocracies" working to erode, like sand against limestone, our traditional systems and institutions. Greenblatt and others, like Scott Henderson of Media Sauce, see this new era of mobilization in terms of altruistic swarms. "When you have the ability to shine a bright light on a cause, you are also going to create higher levels of expectations by people for more intimacy and immediacy and higher velocities for change," Henderson said Friday at the Mashable event. "Twestival? What was that but a self-organized swarm? It's just the beginning." Meanwhile, new media leaders, including Clay Shirky, say new forms of management will be needed to weather the changes.

Adds Greenblatt: "Social media is not just about reading a story online and deciding whether to reddit or propeller it or digg it. This is noise. Noise. For me, social media is Wikipedia, with 10 million members all across the planet with a mission to be the repository of human knowledge, accessible to every person alive. It's Twitter and what happened in Iran. Did Twitter change the course of that election? Maybe not. But far more significantly, it changed forever how Iranians think of themselves. Twitter didn't change the outcome now... But it will."

For more on SoCap, check out this interview with Kevin Jones, a co-founder of the conference, which runs September 1-3. To follow SoCap on Twitter, the hashtag is #SOCAP09.