Social Innovation In India
1. Watch this Ted Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_social_media_can_make_history?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare.
There has been much discussion and disagreement about the role of digital technology in social change, as the fascinating debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky on digital political organising reveals, with Gladwell making a series of powerful points about the limits of social media in building the relationships required for meaningful change to take place. Malcolm Gladwell’s robust critique of these arguments: “Small Change.” Shirky’s response: “The Political Power of Social Media.”Certainly, high profile success stories like M-Pesa – the mobile phone-based money transfer and banking service launched by Vodafone in Kenya in 2007, which gave millions of people access to basic financial services for the first time – have been cited as evidence of the potential of digital technology to transform the lives of the poor.
The British innovation think-tank Nesta has conducted very interesting work on Digital Social Innovation. In particular, it has developed a typology for categorizing and explaining the different roles digital technology can potentially play in promoting ‘social good’, and provided a series of examples for each (Stokes et al., 2017). At the same time, it is clear that digital technology is far from a ‘silver bullet’ when it comes to tackling the most deep-rooted social problems, and that it may even exacerbate some of them.
Discuss the role of Digital Technology on Social Innovation in your own words and opinions. Discuss its importance in developing countries like India.
(1000 words)