<p>MSNBC: "Time was, the Internet just distributed information. Then it evolved into a sort of electronic connector, linking everyone in a person’s social circle. Now? Fasten your seatbelts. Think social networks, dozens or hundreds of them — yours, your best friend’s, your coworker’s, your company’s — all connected together digitally by six degrees, then organized around a single cause or idea, or a multitude of causes and ideas. Save The Whales. Pave My Street. Elect John Doe. End Global Warming.</p>
<p>But don’t stop there. Raise some money. Ask each one of these dozens, hundreds, thousands whom you’ve cause-wired to pitch in a dollar, an idea, a Saturday afternoon — from Delhi to Detroit. And then keep everyone posted by the hour or by the day on how much money they’re raising, how their ideas are being harnessed (or not), or how their time translates into someone else’s health or opportunity, or into everyone’s clean air. Show them perpetually — with the simple click of a mouse.</p>
<p>Sound far-fetched, like some warmed-over 60s’ social change rhetoric? Guess again. This stuff is already happening, and maybe faster than you think: As of June, some 41 percent of all Facebook visitors were over the age of 35. Suddenly, it seems, the world of philanthropy doesn’t look or feel the same anymore. …</p>
<p>Colleen Macklin, 37, the chair of the communications design and technology lab at Parsons, is at ground zero in the assault on old thinking around social change. Her new PET Lab — an incubator for Prototyping, Evaluation, Teaching, and Learning around the use of multimedia for social change — will work with interested nonprofits and community groups to create rapid prototypes of video games and other media for use in encouraging philanthropy.</p>
<p>Macklin’s goal: to engage new generations, globally, around social problem-solving that matters. “There’s a need for philanthropy to engage a younger audience,” says Macklin, an interactive designer who has collaborated globally with such clients as Citibank, France Telecom, and Mo</p>