An Idea For Twitter-based Philanthropy

I’m very taken with this idea: that we can do one big good thing for the benefit of others by each doing one small good thing for the benefit of others. That if we collaborate we can, at little cost to ourselves, confer a large benefit on others. Here’s an obvious example of the sort of thing I mean. If you were to ask me to give £100 to a particular charity, I would balk. I don’t make that much money, I have other charitable donations, I need to buy avocado toast and so on and so on. But if you were to ask me to give £1 on the understanding that 99 other people would also give £1 pound, I would do it without a second thought. (I don’t claim that this is even an idea slightly original to me, but I don’t have any immediate sources in mind for places this sort of thing has been done.)

It doesn’t have to be money, though. It can be time and expertise. If you were to ask me to proofread the university application of an underprivileged person, or the CV of someone long unemployed, I might balk (in fact, I wouldn’t, because I have plenty of spare time for reading things, but there are many people who don’t have plenty of spare time who would understandably balk). But if you were to ask me to read a line, or a section, of such an application, or such a CV, I would do it without a second thought. And I’m guessing there’s many other people who would feel the same.

The main obstacle to such proposals is, I take it, logistical. You may be happy enough to participate in such small benevolences, but only if doing them doesn’t take too long. You’d be happy to quickly give a pound, but if doing so required you to browse to a site, go through several screens of checking out, log in to paypal or get your debit card, you might not. Spending, say, five minutes to donate a pound just seems too much hassle.

(Think of shopping on amazon: buying things on it always feels — at least to me — like a surprise, like it takes one screen too few. I’m almost certain that I would buy fewer books if they asked me was I sure before placing my order. These small differences matter.)

Similarly for the proofreading: if it were delivered by email, it would require you to log in to your email, find the message and reply to it, and so on, which actions would take longer than the actual reading of the line or section of the document in question. The small good thing suddenly doesn’t seem so small.

But there are ways around this sort of problem. You might have shopped in places, either online or in actual shops, where they ask you if you want to round up the amount you’re paying, with the difference going to some charity or other. Such things work because you’re already buying something, so it doesn’t require any further effort on your part to make the donation.

I think the same sort of thing could apply to the CV/application example. What we need is to piggyback on some activity you perform for your own good in the same way that charities piggyback on the purchases you perform for your own good. And it needs to be something that involves reading, presumably.

But twitter is something you perform for your own good (at least, kinda), and twitter involves reading. So my thought is: use twitter, an environment in which you’re already reading, to keep the time-cost of participating in small proofreading down. Take the CVs, or the personal statements, divide them up into chunks, and tweet them to the people who are interested in helping out. They look at it sandwiched between Trump tweets or memes or updates from friends and quickly tweet any small corrections. These corrections get aggregated somehow and the feedback gets passed on to the author of the document. (Note, btw, that this harnesses what is perhaps the strongest urge known to humankind, the urge to correct people online.)

Now, there are obvious enough problems with such a proposal. Even assuming we could resolve issues about privacy and anonymity (which I think we could) one might justifiably worry that the correctness (from a proofreading perspective) of a document can’t be determined on the basis of the correctness of the small chunks that make it up. Here’s a toy example. Imagine you read:

• I approached the copse and yet remained calm.

While that seems like a perfectly fine sentence if it were someone’s recounting a Duke of Edinburgh experience in which they came across a bear-filled clump of trees, it would be less fine were someone recounting a Duke of Edinburgh experience in which they rode around in an ambulance, and the sentence were preceded, say, by:

• We got called out to check on a body that had been found. The paramedic asked me to get out first and check it out.

In context, it’s clear that the author has mistyped ‘copse’ for ‘corpse’, but without context this wouldn’t be at all clear.

In short, it might be that decent proofreading is not something which can be done on a sentence by sentence level. Granted, that is a problem, albeit one that might be amenable to a clever solution (I don’t know what the solution is). I don’t really mind if you think that this particular idea is a bad one; what I hope is you can agree that the logic underlying it, that trying to implement systems in which we cooperate in small ways to help others, is one worth thinking about, and piggybacking is a good to go about it, and twitter and related sites offer possibilities for piggybacking, in light of the fact that we spend so much time on them.