How many of us saw the recent post of 21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity by Buzzfeed and took five minutes out of day to look at them and feel a little bit better about the world? I know I did, I'm always compelled to look at that stuff when it comes around.

Let's face it, most everyone loves a little pick-me-up. We all like to feel good and feel as though we have real reasons to feel good about our world from time to time. But there's more than just little hits of self-gratification going on here, as an article about swarming, social media, and social good I recently ran across notes:

It’s called swarming (and you should tell your kids all about it): Working together and acting cooperatively without strong leadership, while consistently making decisions that result in the best possible outcome for society. And social media swarming is resulting in social good.

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Richard Janda, a professor at the Faculty of Law of McGill University and co-author of a recent book on corporate social responsibility, says, “The Internet helps us to gauge or measure our reactions relative to those of others. It does this by allowing us to see and count how many others are swarming to what I like.

“We need to know that others are doing so as well, so that my willingness to give gains collective significance.”

It’s a form of accountability-based influence. The more you can compare yourself to others and see what they’re doing, the more you know they can see what you’re doing.

There’s a new economy emerging and generosity will be one of its currencies.

It can be easy to wax pessimistic about how we use the Internet and social media. A quick Google search for any number of search terms often yields a cornucopia of lowest common denominator results. Trending Twitter topics regularly make day-time television seem erudite. And a scan of the comments on most You Tube videos is generally enough to make you cry.

But under the veneer of banality that attends most aspects of our lives, there really is something special going on here. What stories like this show us is the same idea to which I pointed in my political opus The Politics of Hope some months ago: people really do want to be and do good.

The trick in which we're no engaged is finding ways to use the tools at our disposal to help people work together to do good things that improve the state of the world on all sorts of levels. Seems like we might finally make good on the often over-used Gandhi quote about being the change you wish to see in the world.