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Capturing Ambient Emotion Reactions - The seed that became RSSA

Wed, 05/30/2007 - 00:44 — kyleshannon

On October 14th, 2006, I was at a private Retreat with a number of very interesting people and during a lunch break, we got to talking about social action and how it lived or died on the Internet.

Something had been striking me is the fact that there is so much on the Internet that begs for some sort of response or action, that I find myself overwhelmed and numb. As we were talking at lunch, a phrase popped into my head, "Ambient Emotional Reations".

Think about all of those moments where you hear a podcast, read a story, watch a video that elicit some emotion reaction in you where you think, "That's not right, someone should do something." Or even, "*I* should do something." And yet... there is no immediate way, no simple click, no apparent action for you to take.

Sure, you can go to Google and learn more and research who's doing what about that particular issue, but you have your 300 back-emails to catch up on and the major media site STILL won't hyperlink to site outside of their little content kingdom... so your emotional reaction fades away and you move on.

What if we could create a system that allows us to create Really Simple Actions and tie them to those pieces of content, commentary or causes and capture that impulse to do some Social good... even if it is as simple as sending a note of encouragement.

It was Andrew Rasiej that blurted, "I've got the name... RSSA: Really Simple Social Action." And all of a sudden, the flood gates of ideas opened and this initiative was born.

So there it is, for what it's worth, the moment that a simple conversation was transformed by a couple of "AH HAH! Moments" (as Jerry Michalski likes to call them), into a solid idea which is now looking very like it is going to transform into something that might capture some of that ambient emotional noise and turn a lot of small actions into a large positive impact.

Thank you to everyone who is jumping on board and driving this project forward! Can't wait to participate and see what we can create!