I am not very Internet-savvy, so I heard about Free Rice only yesterday. In the last 24 hours, I donated about 15 bowls of rice and told many other people. Interestingly, it seemed to capture their otherwise jaded imaginations in thinking about world hunger. In that time, the viral force of the phenomenon has apparently outstripped the capacity of the website and people are reporting that they are unable to use it. So where does the force of a charitable Internet fad go from here?
If these clicks were votes or fractions of cents, they would result in some kind of huge mobilization. As it is, where will all the charitably-motivating clickery go?
Shouldn’t it spill out into the real world somehow?
The whole time I was participating, feeling good about wasting my time in a HELPFUL CAUSE, I also wondered if it was some kind of social experiment, to see if people would be more likely to continue clicking away like gerbils in a Skinnerian experiment, as long as they thought somehow people would be fed by each click. Apparently, people care. I was thinking to myself, it would not be a bad thing to spend an hour day to generate 10 bowls of rice. But how does this translate into a measureable world-wide impulse to aid the hungry and poor?
I mean, did you SEE the numbers??
I want to know if this will motivate people to mobilize in other ways, now that they see how quickly we could unite in one direction, given the medium of the Internet as a coordinating tool.