CanManSG

SO. There's this thing called CanManSG, which is short for "Can Man Live on Social Media Alone?" And here's the twitter of the person from SG who's doing it. It starts today, I think, and she (daphne, whom I will refer to as CanManSG here forth because I have beef with the project, not the person) is starting to travel around london for a week. In my opinion, the project is stupid for a number of reasons:

1) Because I've had friends over and backpacking on the cheap, this just feels like a very glorified way of sponging off other people. The whole travelling-to-london-on-no-money thing is not too far away from backpacking. I don't see it as something extraordinary or special. People do it all the time-- they save money by staying at other people's houses, get around by hitchhiking, try to find free things to do. It's not altogether impossible to "live on social media alone".  

2) It's been proven already, so many times. I don't get why it has to be proven _again_. Take amanda palmer, for instance. There were so many occasions where she's tweeted and someone has supplied her with a keyboard or ukulele, or she's planned beforehand and had fans feed and house her and her band in return for tickets or merch. Even that time crabstickz and his friend tweeted for a place to stay in amsterdam and Lidewij and Sanne answered the call. If one thinks that the usefulness and power of social media has yet to be proven, I don't think he is very familiar with the current community that exists within social media. 

3) As far as I can see, this project offers no renumeration or form of exchange. The person participating is basically going around london asking for free dinners. Obviously if CanManSG was relying on someone who was well-off, then the person could afford it, but as a broke-ass student I see no reason to have to pay for someone's dinner when I don't even know the person. If I knew the person as a friend, and the person has done things for me, then yeah I wouldn't mind.

I have issues with this, because even couchsurfing has the mutual understanding that the visitor returns the favor of his host in some way. The visitor could offer his language skills, for example, or cook, or buy his host a few drinks. This understanding is present in WWOOF-ing, too, or with au pairs. There is no mention of exchange in this project. 

While CanManSG's facebook page has said: "I will be tasked to carry out various tasks of charity and contribute towards several good causes.", there has been no mention of the specific acts of charity that will be done, or the organisations who will benefit from this project. All recent updates so far on both the facebook page and twitter have been about CanManSG's experiences of finding places to stay and meeting people, not on the volunteering CanManSG is supposed to be doing.

4) From reading the twitter feed, I genuinely don't understand why people find this so exciting and are so fascinated by it. It's honestly nothing new, and for me it's not unheard of. It's like treating Social Media as this wonderful magical thing capable of doing all the good, which it is, but I don't think it's fair to exploit it and make people sympathise with you and pay for you to be a tourist. It would make more sense if this was happening in 2008, when everyone was new to Web 2.0, and twitter was still a new thing, but it doesn't make sense now.

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From reading CanManSG's twitter feed, many companies and hotels have offered to pay for the person's meals or accommodation. Personally I have no problems with this win-win situation when it's a marketing and PR event, rather than an individual's quest to test social media. I think it should be presented as such, because I'm not sure how individuals, as opposed to businesses, can stand to gain from helping CanManSG out.