Ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of media messages, e-mails, texts and tweets coming at you everyday, yet cut off from what gives you a deeper sense of purpose in life? Join the crowd. 

A recent Digital Lifestyle Information Survey from online content company Magnify.net reveals that most people, 64.2 percent, say the information streaming toward them has increased by more than 50 percent during the past year alone. A staggering 72.7 percent of them describe this deluge as: “a roaring river,” “a flood,” or “a massive tidal wave.” Not exactly descriptors indicative of an improved quality of life.

“Something happened when the world went all virtual and mouse-driven,” says XEODesign president and mobile game Tilt creator Nicole Lazzaro.  “We gained access to a lot more data and choice, but lost some of the essence of what makes us feel so good.” 

Like a growing number of game designers out there, Lazzaro believes passionately that while the digital world grows more crowded and overwhelming to people, games and gamification represent a way to make life more satisfying – prompting us to play, drawing us closer into the present moment, and potentially transforming the way we live, work, learn and create.

How do you hijack corporate culture, demoralize employees and derail multi-million dollar marketing campaigns? All too easily, it turns out.

Fueled by the internet and the public’s growing distain for corporate greed, hacktivism is a trend on the rise. Today’s hacktivists use increasingly clever tactics in order to elevate public debate about the way corporations do business. In more cases than not, they succeed.

“What we do—and what you can do too—is impersonate captains of industry, infiltrate corporate events, give absurd and revealing presentations, and then escape to tell the story in the press, hopefully to the great embarrassment of the target,” say the Yes Men, a group of hacktivists that recently punked the likes of Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Dow, The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the United Nations, among others. “You don’t have to be a James Bond for this. But what you might need is a fake email address and a business card.”

When academics, pundits and corporate heavy hitters take the stage to debate semantics, who wins? That question weighed heavily in my mind during last week’s “Great CSR Debate,” an event hosted by PR Firm Fenton and instigated by Professor Aneel Karnani’s controversial Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, “The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility.”

As the webcast beamed out live to an audience of over a thousand viewers, thought leaders including The Economist’s Matthew Bishop, ThomsonReuters’ Chrystia Freeland, UN Global Compact’s George Kell, BSR’s Aaron Cramer, Campbell Soup’s Dave Stangis and GE Foundation’s Bob Corcoran argued about concept that evidently means different things to different people. As moderator of the debate, my intent was to “navigate” the conversation to the point where a “side” would “prevail.” But within the first few minutes, I realized why efforts in this direction were futile.

“What do we mean by corporate social responsibility (CSR)?” asked Karnani. “It’s not just that the terminology is clunky. It is also unclear.”

Why do some companies win public trust and others lose it? That’s a question more people are asking themselves, as global faith in business remains unfortunately fragile. Turns out the trust deficit, a trend on the rise for ten years now, is more than a mere wrinkle on the face of capitalism. It’s a pressing concern for every shareholder.

When companies lose trust, they often lose capital. Case in point: Gulf disaster stocks BP, Halliburton, Transocean and Anadarko each sank between 25 and 45 percent during the past four months. The Goldman Sachs-SEC debacle pushed company shares down by 15 percent, and the Dow down by 130 points. Massey stock plunged 42 percent following a deadly string of safety failures. Toyota shares dropped 16 percent following its massive recall. And as of today, none of these companies has fully rebounded, indicating the markets grow slower to forgive.

“The last couple of years have provided plenty of reasons for a building sense of mistrust,” says Motley Fool’s Alyce Lomax. “Goldman Sachs and BP have become the most recent high-profile examples of the many big institutions whose highly paid managers seem to be only out for themselves. ”

Child pornography is the Internet’s most severe social problem. In recent years it has exploded as countless illicit images are circulated online – viewed by pedophiles and passed around from predator to predator. Since 2003, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has reviewed and analyzed almost 30 million of these images. It projects that an additional nine million images will be examined in the coming year. NCMEC also acknowledges that the scope of the child porn problem is too large for law enforcement, policy makers and child protection groups to handle on their own. Enter the world’s second biggest technology company.

“We can help make a big dent,” Microsoft SVP and General Counsel Brad Smith told a group of journalists, bloggers and industry influencers at the company’s recent Citizenship Accelerator Summit. “These photos live on the Internet forever and every time they are shared or viewed, the children in them are re-victimized. It’s not enough to stop the perpetrators. The real point is getting these images off the Internet.”

Corporate social and environmental performance is all the rage in today’s investment environment. With increasing frequency, analysts are monitoring, evaluating, and ranking that performance. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) lists – ranging from Corporate Knight’s Global 100 to Ethisphere Institute’s Most Ethical Companies and Corporate Responsibility magazine’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens – grow more plentiful and visible each day. Publishers now vie to position their lists as strategic holy grails for corporations making the cut, and Wall Street has taken notice. Nearly one out of every nine dollars of professionally managed assets in the United States – valued at an estimated $2.71 trillion – has been invested in companies that perform well in CSR rankings.

“Company stakeholders from investors to customers to employees to regulators watch the 100 Best Corporate Citizens List closely, and are using it now more than ever to make important decisions,” said Corporate Responsibility magazine publisher Jay Whitehead in a recent press release. “As a result, making the List is worth millions or even billions in increased shareholder and brand value.”

This should be good news for Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Monsanto which, despite their notoriety, have been counted as “Best Citizens” by Corporate Responsibility numerous times. “When someone asks you to define corporate transparency, show them this list,” touts the magazine. But to an increasing number of observers, the transparency seems elusive – as does a clear indication of what the CSR industry stands for.

It was an unusually quiet plane ride home. Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz and Share Our Strength Founder Bill Shore had reached the end of a life-changing journey, after having spent several days in Haiti bearing witness to the unthinkable and helping to address earthquake survivor needs.

“We finally let off our last two passengers, celebrity artist Wyclef Jean and a young orthopedic surgeon from Grand Rapids, a father of four who had been in Haiti since day three performing emergency amputations with borrowed farm equipment,” Swartz recounts. “That gave me thirty-five minutes of one-on-one time with Bill, who I never get to be alone with. But I don’t think we said a word to each other the rest of the trip.”

Swartz and Shore were likely in shock. The full-blown mental processing of what they had just endured in and around Haiti would begin later, as they assimilated back into their previous routines. As part of his re-acclamation process, Swartz wrote a series of downloads to Timberland stakeholders – including a Fast Company blog post, which summarizes his takeaways, and a personal letter to employees entitled: “Bearing Witness to Haiti,” which provides a remarkable play-by-play account of his physical and emotional experience.

“I felt I needed to get this off my chest,” says Swartz. “So I wrote about the heroism of the many doctors we saw, the heartbreak of the destruction, the inspiration I felt with Bill and Wyclef, and the indignation I felt at the world’s well-intended but inept efforts to cope with this disaster.”

Investors are hoarding it to hedge against the dollar’s weakness. Consumers are buying it up in ever increasing volumes. Gold seemingly adds up to big opportunities wherever you look, with US gold jewelry sales representing a growing $17 billion market and China gold jewelry sales reaching nearly 260 billion yuan in 2009. But the fact is that this precious metal has a dark side, too. As gold’s prestige and value increases, so do the implications of the trade itself.

“Most consumers don't know where the gold in their products comes from, or how it is mined,” says NoDirtyGold.org, a group that encourages retailers to cease carrying gold that comes from illegal sources.  “Gold mining is a dirty industry: it can displace communities, contaminate drinking water, hurt workers, and destroy pristine environments.”

Dirty gold is no marginal issue. According to a recent 60 Minutes report, dirty gold mining is rather pervasive, and is also responsible for “the deadliest war since WWII.” Five million people have reportedly died in the Democratic Republic of Congo in a war primarily funded by gold mined in the country by warlords, and then smuggled out to be sold in retail stores around the world. Could that bracelet you just bought at Wal-Mart have come from illegal gold originated in Congo? According to 60 Minute’s findings, it is a vague possibility.

One hundred and five million barrels. That’s how much crude the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that we will consume per day by the year 2030. Pretty staggering considering the fact that delegates from nearly 200 countries just gathered in Copenhagen with the singular goal of solving the world’s carbon emissions problem.

Going in, there was significant skepticism about the developed world’s ability to collaborate with emerging economies in order to come to a workable agreement on how to share the burdens related to climate change. Now, with only a moderately aggressive climate change agreement in place, the IEA estimates that global oil consumption will continue to rise – and with it, greenhouse gas emissions, international tensions, and the race of top oil firms to tap into the world’s reserves wherever and however they can.

Deep in the trenches of Ecuador lies an unfortunate victim of the developed world’s unwillingness to more rapidly taper its addiction to fossil fuels. It is a primal rainforest – an incredibly pristine and biodiverse region, holding the greatest known selection of trees, insects and amphibians on earth. The Amazon rainforest serves a distinct purpose for humanity, providing essential nutrients, absorbing large quantities of carbon dioxide and emitting oxygen into the atmosphere. It is home to several indigenous communities, including the Achuar, Shuar, and Kichwa peoples, who have lived there for millennia.

If you’re like me you spend a fair portion of each holiday season assembling plastic toys made in China, which often arrive unassembled in several dozen pieces. I have to admit, I do so begrudgingly. Of course I appreciate that all holiday gifts are given with the best of intentions and that, in the spirit of the season, we should appreciate all we have and are given. But the truth of the matter is, however magical the color photos on any given toy box look, what rests inside the package is often another story.

Last Christmas and Chanukah my son received, among other things, the Evenflo Exersauser, Baby Einstein Color Blocks and a Fisher Price Go Diego Boat Toy. While the Exersauser took a painfully long time to put together (the instructions might as well have been written in Chinese), both the Color Blocks and Boat Toy were recalled for a violation of lead paint standards. How do I know this? Because I monitored their status on the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s (CPSC) website. How would an average parent who does not obsess about such matters know this? Most wouldn’t, as virtually no marketer spends as much recalling a dangerous product as promoting its sale.