Using the Internet for Good

The internet can be a source of good! This is a post of awesome websites that support charities, literacy, and other good causes. Use them as much as you can! And comment if you know of a good one I left out.

Better World Books is an online book seller. Their mission:
Better World Books collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide. With more than six million new and used titles in stock, we’re a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders.
I've found that they are usually the same price, if not cheaper than, Amazon, mainly because they offer free shipping within the US. It can take a little longer for the books to arrive (app. 11 days), but for only 99 cents, your item will arrive in 2-6 business days.

Free Rice is a trivia website, and for each right answer you get, the website donates 10 grains of rice to help end world hunger.

GoodSearch is an online search engine. Once you choose a charity, each search you conduct will donate to said charity. There are almost a hundred thousand charities participating (http://www.goodsearch.com/charitylist.aspx) and you can install toolbars for your browser or make it your default search on Google Chrome. (Here is a list of more charity search engines.) If people used these search engines as much as they used google, they'd change the world!

The Hunger Site is a place - you click, and a cup of food is donated because of your click. According to this website, there are almost 2 billion people hooked up to the internet. If each person clicked on The Hunger Site daily, that would be 2 billion cups of food! On the website, there are lots more links to similar websites.

That's all I have for now, but I'm going to keep looking to find more awesome places to help others through your internet connection!

The Social Network

I saw The Social Network last night with my husband for his birthday. It's about the founder of facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and how the creation of the social networking site leads to two lawsuits for Zuckerberg. One is a trio who approached Zuckerberg with a very similar idea and is now suing for intellectual property theft. The other is Zuckerberg's friend and colleague Eduardo Saverin who was tricked out of his shares of the company much later in facebook's development.

When I left this movie, I didn't really know what to think. It's a very well done movie, and I thought the script and acting were spectacular. The cinematography was great, too. I just didn't know what I thought about the arrogant Zuckerberg as he strove to be cool and make facebook something great, not caring much about who got in the way.

I stumbled upon this article: http://www.cnbc.com/id/39501838 It's about how the older generation reacted to the movie compared to the younger generation. Older viewers typically saw Zuckerberg obsessed with ambition, driven by greed, and generally morally frowned upon, while younger views typically admired Zuckerberg for his entrepreneurship and saw his ambition as necessary. This quote from the article sums it up:

“I was asked by older people again and again how I could play a character who is capable of being so mean, as if I were almost condemned by this role,” he [Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuckerberg] said in a phone call. “But young people never had that reaction. They kept saying, ‘This guy was a genius. Look what he has created.’ ”

Well, I think I've decided how I feel about Zuckerberg's actions, especially when I think about this verse:

"What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?" ~Matthew 16:26

Zuckerberg did do something amazing. Facebook changed the way we communicated. But he wasn't honest with the people who presented him with the idea in the first place or his best friend. He cast them aside for more numbers, for a greater vision of facebook. Some people may view this as necessary. The movie's poster said it: You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.

I just read through Ecclesiastes, and the word hebel is used dozens of times. It means vapor or breath. It's been translated as meaningless, futile, pointless, vapor, vanity. Solomon looks at all the things man strives after in his life - money, pleasure, wisdom, power, prestige - and says it's all in vanity. It's like a vapor, it will be here for a moment and gone the next. Facebook may have changed our lives today, but it'll vanish, along with everything else on this material earth.

Zuckerberg may have decided that his company and vision was more important than those relationships, but why? Money doesn't make anyone truly happy. Eduardo said at the end of the movie, "I was your only friend." But after being dishonest and letting his ambition overrule common laws of decency, Zuckerberg had millions of members on his website and no true friends.

And let's not get into the misogyny in this movie. Two female college students that had personalities and two female lawyers. The rest of the females were half-clothed, drunk, clingy, ready to do it in a dirty bathroom stall, getting high, oogled at, dancing on tables, or on the website that Zuckerberg created to compare undergrad females at Harvard based on hotness. Or looking at it in horror.

I can't deny that it was an extremely well done movie, though. I actually recommend it.

Disclaimer: Who knows how far or close this movie is from the actual truth. I know it's based on a nonfiction book, The Accidental Billionaires, but I haven't read it, and anything I've said in this post just deals with the characters and actions in the movie.