If you’ve ever hesitated over whether to “like” the status update about your cousin’s fractured leg or dearly departed pug, you get that technology can be awkward at times.
Yet thanks to our iPhones, we carry around a device that allows us to help find the way, locate a first responder, donate to disaster victims and reach-out-and-touch someone in a thousand ways that boy scouts of yesteryear could only dream about.
Do you need a ride? A place to sleep? Want my leftovers? Even in more pedestrian situations, we’re helping each other more thanks to our phones – as you might remember from our issue focused on how apps are breaking down social barriers.
Maybe your gran told you to never talk to strangers, but now you’re couch surfing, carpooling and maybe even getting free food from them thanks to apps. And you have no intention of going back to those dark “stranger danger” days.
Yet, the connection between acting compassionately and technology isn’t so apparent. Every time we zone out playing games during that tedious daily commute, let an iPad babysit our kids, send a scathing tweet or shut off someone’s Facebook statuses, we are going in another direction. Definitely not the kind of direction that earns you a merit badge.
So much so, that tech and compassion might strike you as an “oxymoron,” as Sona Mehring the CEO at Caring Bridge told a recent audience of about 350 educators and tech experts, telling the story of the nonprofit she started in 1997 to help two friends with a premature baby keep friends and family in the know.
She wasn’t preaching to the converted at Stanford’s inaugural Technology and Compassion Conference. Rather, she was connecting the dots for a crowd of about 350 — many of them educators — who were either initially as skeptical as she was or unsure where the good could be found in devices that are more frequently in the news for bringing out the worst in people.
After all, the benefits hyped from “killer apps” are rarely their saintly virtues.
But it seems an arbitrary distinction: when talking broadly about technology, it’s not inherently good or bad. Like any other tool, it depends on what you do with it. Use your hammer for Habitat for Humanity, it’s all good. Hit your co-worker with it bang-bang Maxwell style, and the hammer of justice will come find you.
As heavy technology users — or developers — we have a new mission. It’s to spread this idea that even if the old news adage if “it bleeds it leads” still holds up in pixels, tech is not inherently cold, inhumane, or even evil.
Read on for more about how companies and nonprofits are working to expand the reach of tech with heart and soul.
